I hadn’t heard anything at all about the movie “Barnyard” until last week when I suddenly noticed it in the list of movies coming out this Friday. I can only imagine that the reason I didn’t notice it before was because at some point Nickelodeon had the good sense to re-think the movies release and somehow made the mistake to go ahead with it at the last minute.
Barnyard is bad, really bad. The movies plot line is essentially a regurgitation of The Lion King. The main character Otis experiences the death of his father, feels responsible, and then is forced to take his fathers place as the head of the barnyard. Sound familiar?
The movie is full of potty humor, and at one point in the movie the cows get drunk off milk. A character in the movie gets attacked by a coyote, and there is pregnant cow which the main character is trying to flirt with. The jokes are almost all either inappropriate for the younger audience they are directed at, or horribly bad.
One of the movies biggest downfalls in my opinion is the fact that the main character Otis, a boy, is a cow. I would like to think that any child who went to see this movie could pick up on that very large technical snafu pretty quickly. I know it’s a cartoon movie about talking animals, so the writers are already taking a little stretch away from reality. Seriously, how hard would it have been to make Otis and his male cow friends’ bulls instead?
Having a huge mistake like that blatantly in the movie to be shows that the makers of this film had little regard for the intelligence of their audience, and don’t care that now some five year old somewhere is going to think there can be male cows.
If the storyline of this movie interest you, I would recommend picking up a copy of The Lion King. The family movies out in theaters right now are a little scarce. If you are looking for a movie to take your children to in the theaters consider The Ant Bully which was released last week, or Cars which is still playing in some theaters.