Little Eggs: An African Rescue is a 3D animated film produced by Huevocartoon Producciones, a Mexican animation studio, with a big cast of animals on a chaotic journey from Mexico to Africa to save some eggs from being eaten!
The film opens introducing us to Toto, a rooster who is about to become a dad. Strangely in this story, eggs can walk and talk before they have even hatched. An interesting idea but it never stopped being utterly bizarre for me. This is actually the 4th film in the Huevos franchise and the 2nd one to be 3D animated.
Toto didn’t really feel like much of a likeable character to me and he became ever less so after his eggs came into the world, and he became a paranoid helicopter parent. But before he can prove to his kids that he loves them dearly, they are snatched away by a crazy Russian lady and her henchman.
The cast of characters is perhaps too large and completely stifles any character development, reducing many of their personalities to stereotypes and blandness. However, as this is a sequel film and I have not seen the others, it would explain why very little time is given to establishing individual characters.
The film constantly goes from scene to scene of utter chaos and just when you think the goal is achieved, the goal posts shift, keeping perhaps some people on their toes, but for me, it just felt like a lot of filler to reach the 90 minutes runtime without providing a whole lot of substance.
There’s a lot of slapstick attempts at comedy, which will get some giggles out of smaller children, but it wasn’t really funny enough to elicit an audible chuckle from myself. There’s no clever jokes to keep adults engaged with the film and I felt that even older kids would probably feel bored with this movie. Voice acting is fairly mid and had me wondering if the original Spanish cast make the film punchier in its jokes than the English cast does. Not that I’d want to sit through this movie a second time to find out.
The visual designs of the characters aren’t bad per se but still feel a little generic. When it comes to the animation, it’s mostly okay, but I did notice some texture clipping and occasionally the way characters move looks a little bit off. This is especially noticeable when my eyes wandered around the scenes to background models that had not been given as much care as the characters in the foreground.
Strangely enough, way too much attention was given to animating the bouncing tiny breasts of the villain and it was just downright creepy when nothing else on the screen had any jiggle physics. Hair? Nope. Clothes? Nope. Boobs? Yep. Someone pass me the brain bleach.
Overall, Little Eggs: An African Rescue is okay if you need to entertain some kids under 10 years old these school holidays. But for adults like me who enjoy storytelling through innovative art and animation, it’s far too shallow to stay memorable.