Gnomeo… Gnomeo… Wherefore art thou Gnomeo?

Why did Gnomeo and Juliet get made? I’m being serious. It had a budget of $36 million. Someone was motivated to make this movie and make it good. Spoiler alert: I fear the movie was. One song was even gnominated for a Golden Globe. That Disney executive put their reputation on the most high-stakes gamble of 2011, and it paid off—literally. Gnomeo and Juliet made $193.9 million.

While the concept made me suspicious, the cast list quickly assuaged my doubts. The voice actors for this movie included Dolly Parton, Ozzy Osbourne, James McAvoy, Jason Statham, and Emily Blunt. I believe the film surpassed the threshold where throwing enough random stuff together circles back around through bad to good once more.

So what do you get when you cross a famous country star, one of the most adapted works in history, gnomes, and the man who gave up directing Shrek in order to direct Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, but rectified his mistakes by returning for Shrek 2? 

You get a strange, funny, rather unique animated film that shocks you so much by how not bad it is; you almost forget to critique it. Luckily, I am gnotoriously critical and will analyze this movie enough for the both of us. Time to answer the question we have all been wondering: would this movie, by any other name, look as sweet, or did we get a little too lost in the gnomen sauce?

First, we should analyze this movie on its own. As a standalone film, not taking into consideration the novelty of the adaptation or the big-name actors, it’s a solid children’s movie. The story is genuinely compelling and emotionally complex. It tackles some issues, it’s funny, and the animation is solid. Without the adaptation, though, it loses most intrigue. 

So here is where I must immediately move forth and take the movie in context. The problem the movie returns to, over and over again, is that it doesn’t know when it wants to adapt the original and when it wants to be a new piece of media entirely.

This ends up with some weird moments: Paris shows up for all of two seconds before being paired off with Nanette, a character who arguably doesn’t even exist in the original play. I presume they did this in an effort to avoid the difficult conversation of how people used to force fourteen-year-old girls to get married to men they barely knew. Which, like… why put him in at all then? Just to say that they added another reference to good old Shakes? In addition, instead of having Juliet metaphorically tied down with marrying Paris, in this adaptation, Juliet’s dad superglues her feet down to prevent her from leaving. 

Which. Um. That feels worse to me? Maybe?

Even when I was first watching the movie, back when I was rather small, the moment struck as a rather serious moment displaying profound sexism to the point where the father essentially permanently imprisoned his daughter. The father doesn’t apologize, even when his actions lead directly to Juliet almost being killed. This plot beat gets almost no recognition as a bad thing to do to someone. 

To be fair, many children’s movies do tackle complex topics in a worse manner than you pick up on as a child. Even granting them that, there is still the issue that they made the specific decision to ignore the preexisting plot line in order to change it to something that suited the ending they had in mind. I feel they sacrificed the integrity of the adaptation—yes, I’m aware this movie is about animated gnomes having beef with each other—in order to change the tone of the story from up front uncomfortable to deeply disturbing if you think about it for even a second. Integrity, people, come on. 

Ahem. While I have just given one example, trust that there are many more places where I think this movie would have seriously benefited from a closer adaptation to the main storyline, or at least more deliberateness in not following it. Honestly, though, the rest of the movie did easily surpass my expectations. I enjoyed the dialogue, the animation was good, and I particularly loved putting a talking Shakespeare statue in the movie. Forget what I said about integrity, that was a beautiful way to make a joke, expand the concept behind the world, and also neatly explain the ending of the original work so that the effect of changing it would read to all audience members, even if by some miracle of God they hadn’t heard it before.

So, while I have my quibbles, I will give this movie three ceramic bunny statues out of five ceramic bunny statues. If there are gno more questions, I will take my leave before the lark starts to call.