The Wild

A group of animals—a lion (voice by Kiefer Sutherland), a giraffe (Janeane Garofalo), a snake (Richard Kind) and a koala (Eddie Izzard)—escape from a New York zoo and sail to Africa, where they get a taste of what jungle life is really like. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we saw it last year in Madagascar. So, here’s another chapter in the DreamWorks/Disney animated pissing contest: Antz/A Bug’s Life, Shark Tale/Finding Nemo and now this on the heels of Madagascar. But where A Bug’s Life and Nemo were Pixar masterpieces that DreamWorks could never dream of matching, this one is not Pixar and is only marginally better than its clone—in fact, that contrast is the most interesting thing about it. Otherwise, it’s noisy and only so-so, though the animation is quite good.