Megamind Review

This past Thursday we viewed the animated “Megamind” at a theater for Film Criticism and Review. Will Ferrell voices Megamind, the villain to Brad Pitt’s hero Metro Man. Tina Fey voices Roxanne Ritchi, Metro Man’s love interest who later becomes Megamind’s love interest. Jonah Hill voices Hal Stewart, Roxanne’s cameraman who later becomes the film’s antagonist Tighten who Megamind creates to replace Metro Man whom he believes is dead. Finally David Cross voices Megamind’s sidekick Minion. The comedy film takes place in the fictional Metro City where the superheroes battle it out. The evil Megamind battles the good Metro Man until Metro Man fakes his death, which leads to a series of events where Megamind ends up being the hero and getting the girl.

Megamind is an interesting story that would be great animated or not animated, but since it is animated it is allowed to be extremely wild and visually pleasing. The animation is truly awesome to look at and everything is so colorful and stylized. The city has an epic scale that I haven’t seen matched by any animated movie ever too. The heroes walk, fly, fight, and zip across it numerous times and I have to admit that a certain part on top of an Empire State Building-type place made me queasy. I can’t imagine having seen it in 3D!

The characters themselves also came off as likable, hilarious and their motivations were all understandable. No character was fully good or bad. They were all surprisingly layered. The voice-acting certainly helped along the way. Will Ferrell definitely didn’t phone-it-in like he could have and that goes for every other major player too. It helps that their voices are all pretty distinct but never distracting. I was half expecting David Cross to make a reference to how he "Blue himself" in Arrested Development because that show is what I think of when I hear his voice. The notice of the characters being voiced by celebrities went away after a while and thankfully the movie didn't have any self-conscious pop culture references. Many animated films seem to fall back on doing that nowadays so that's just another plus for this particular film in my book.

As far as criticisms go, I don’t really have many. It wasn’t as deep as say Toy Story 3, but it definitely had me caring about its characters anyway. Animated movies usually aren’t for me but this one was good as just a regular old comedy. I also haven’t seen an animated film ever treat heroes and villains so interestingly ambiguously. My final ruling is a 4 out of 5.