Sadly, what could have been a colorful fun-filled romp through New York, meeting endearing creatures and characters and learning a motivational tale that gets us feeling good and ready to face the world, turned out to be a slow-motion yawn-fest with one-dimensional stilted stone-faced cookie-cutter characters who spend most of the film dopily staring at each other or not communicating well, a tired plot tactic that is extremely annoying especially when the characters are supposedly clever. There is one story line where they attempt to state a moral, but it falls very flat.

We end up not caring much about the characters because they have zero personality and we never learn Who What Why Where. The "story" rarely makes sense or is coherent and spends more time on evil than overcoming or resilience. A few attempts at humor go crude rather than clever. There is a bit of life about 3/4ths through, but other than that, just hit fast-forward.

It's a prime example of why we don't go to the theatres any more. If a show ends up being boring or not-as-advertised, we won't have wasted time and money on it and we can fast-forward/rewind/pause/closed caption/.... all the good stuff ... as well as the great feeling of tossing it the bin if it ends up being trash. Such a shame. With the resources this group of film-makers has, everything they do should make sense and be beautiful and praise-worthy and a boon to humanity. CGI is not needed to achieve this, but a good coherent pro-peace story with characters that we care about is.

Very grateful that they attempted to keep it PG and to use a bit of clever vocabulary. Enjoyed the beasts, real and doughy. They should have been the focus of the film. Over all, we were left grateful it was finally over and headed out to do something interesting and worthwhile.