The Slipshod Boss Baby Only Show Flashes Of Creativity In Some Of Its Visuals

DreamWorks Animation used to have some real ambition as a studio, or, at least, the promise of ambition. If the radically different tones and aesthetics of their first two films (Antz and The Prince Of Egypt) suggested a studio that could create a wide variety of animated motion pictures, well, they've been inconsistent in fulfilling that promise over the course of the next two decades. For every Shrek (only the first two!), How To Train Your Dragon or Kung Fu Panda that showed real imagination and artistic promise, you also had stuff like The Road To El Dorado, Bee Movie and Trolls that had them chasing other popular animated family movies for quick and easy profits. When it comes to creating worthwhile cinema, ya win some, ya lose some in the world of DreamWorks Animation.

Their feature from this past Spring, The Boss Baby, belongs in the second class of motion picture. The gist of this animated family comedy is that seven-year-old Tim Templeton (Miles Bakshi) lives the perfect life with his two parents, but all of that gets disrupted when his new baby brother arrives. This little baby comes into the house wearing a suit, clutching a briefcase and taking all of the attention of Tim's parents. Like any kid adjusting to a new baby sibling, Tim is having a difficult time adjusting to the new little guy hogging the spotlight in his house and that's before Tim discovers that this baby can actually talk and is on a secret mission.

Yes, this is no ordinary baby for he is actually The Boss Baby (Alec Baldwin), a smooth talking baby immersed in the world of corporate jargon like memo's, corner-office and sushi. Turns out, there's only so much love in the world and babies aren't getting as much love as they used to thanks to the ever-growing presence of puppies, which are sold by PuppyCo., the company Tim's parents work for. The Boss Baby has gotta know what kind of plans the head of that company, Francis E. Francis (Steve Buscemi), is up to that could further disrupt the balance of love in the world and despite the sibling rivalry they share, both Tim and The Boss Baby must work together to complete this important task.

Hands down the most impressive thing about The Boss Baby is its animation, which has an elastic stylized style to it that continues director Tom McGrath's artistic sensibilities established in the Madagascar movies to push computer animation more towards the more heightened visual tendencies of classic hand-drawn cartoons. All of the various characters have designs that are heavily exaggerated while Tim's got an assortment of fantasy sequences meant to show off his vibrant imagination that make use of plenty of bright colors and what appears to be hand-drawn animation. In terms of trying to create its own sense of style visually, The Boss Baby is admirable in how it wholly commits to a zanier kind of animation.

Of course, even here in the animation, there are some problems in getting that style of animation to be executed properly, namely in the realistic looking textures of the skin and clothing of the characters that make the stylized character designs (particularly a heftier baby named Jimbo) look more strange than adorable. Speaking of problems, The Boss Baby has got itself a large a number of flaws that drag it down to the lower end of DreamWorks Animation titles in terms of overall quality. Most notably, it's a film that weirdly stumbles in both being a comedy and in being sentimental, two things it tries ever so hard to be.

In terms of yuks, the basic premise of The Boss Baby revolves around juxtaposing a young baby with the "mature" world of corporate management doesn't really result in all that imaginative of gags, it basically just amounts to name-dropping a lot of slang and terms heavily associated with a white-collar job. To be fair, a handful of visual jokes centered on facial expressions or bits of stylized body language do hit the mark but the vast majority of The Boss Baby's humor is focused on more tired pieces of humor. Even worse though is the movies attempt to suddenly be meaningful and emotional in its third act which a plot turn that's laughably bad in its execution.

The Boss Baby as a movie hasn't really set up these characters to be fully formed individuals whose relationship to one another we should care about, so a massively forced airplane-set scene involving them separating and then (SPOILER ALERT!) getting back together just feels like The Boss Baby trying to eat up extra minutes in its running time. The amount of treacly scenes only increases as the film winds down and none of them land with much of an impact. Y'know, director Tom McGrath (along with directors Eric Darnell and Conrad Vernon) were able to make a super clever, fun qand stylized animated family movie with Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted a few years ago, so it's a pity lightning couldn't strike twice with The Boss Baby, which just feels lacking in both humor and its anemic attempts at being emotionally engaging.