Norm - O Herói do Ártico

For the tots, the film is blandly inoffensive enough to offer some Saturday afternoon entertainment, but this isn't one of those crossover hits that parents can enjoy just as much as their kids.

The animation already looks dated, and it feels as lazy as the bland narrative, which finds Norm traveling to New York City to try stop construction on his home.

Even the trait that should endear the audience to Norm, his infamous " Arctic Shake," in which the bear goes into uncontrollable fits of dancing and twerking, becomes unbearable to watch.

Think of every trope associated with animated family movies and you'll find them all in Norm of the North, a thoroughly uninspired story of a polar bear attempting to save his habitat from a hypocritical hippie seeking to develop condos in the Arctic.

There is no nuance to the animation or detail in the visuals; the whole thing looks like it was slapped together in time for the crew to hit happy hour at Bennigan's.

A bland, nearly incompetent animated movie that assumes kids can only be entertained by the sights of a dancing polar bear, of "cute and marketable" lemmings (the movie's own description) urinating in an aquarium, and of a bird defecating on people.

If I wasn't already convinced of this movie's obnoxiousness, its rendering of Graham's character sealed the deal.

"Norm of the North" feels as if it intended to be a better movie, but got confused along the way.

No. No. Just no. No child should be exposed to this.

Told in a chaotic fashion, the movie jumps from scene to scene without a lot of continuity.

Norm of the North is a rancid excursion into well-intentioned animated chaos that proves to be an excruciating endurance test no one of sound mind or body should ever attempt to watch, and that includes their children.

With its strangely adult plot about global warming and real estate development and its mediocre animation style, Norm of the North is one to skip.

Not awful, but it is also not special, not new, not funny, and not that interesting.

Neither its animation nor voice performances are particularly memorable, but Norm of the North, especially in its early section set in the Arctic, has its appealing moments.

It's got elements of Happy Feet, Madagascar, Despicable Me, Ice Age, and any number of other films. But most of these elements go nowhere.

While the film, with its preponderance of potty jokes, might placate the very young already primed by boisterous singing chipmunks, older viewers will likely find it all harder to, uh, bear.

The title character of "Norm of the North" may be a bear, but the movie is a dog. Actually, that assessment is unfair to dogs - real, anthropomorphic and metaphorical.

[Wall's] visually unimaginative style ... may work, barely, in increments of fifteen minutes or less, but fails to engage over 90 minutes on the big screen.

The animation and character work is TV-level: so frenetic so that no real artistry is needed, but not so busy that you keep from noticing how the same background humans are repeated throughout. (I know it's a small world after all, but still.)

Not since Bratz has this writer seen a screenplay so carelessly written, a sort of "Dear John" letter to Hollywood that goes out of its way to paint actors and directors as megalomaniacal idiots.