As you know, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain is very fond of Corgi dogs. Three corgis live in the royal palace, each of which has its own personal majordomo, hairdresser and walker, and then Prince Philip gave his wife a corgi puppy named Rex (Leo Barakat), and he quickly became Her Majesty’s new favorite.
Rex grew up and turned from a puppy into an extremely spoiled dog. He does not follow etiquette, tears up Prince Philip’s favorite slippers on the British flag, pushes other corgis around and calls himself “Her Majesty’s First Dog”. Of course, this cannot but annoy other corgis.
US President Donald Trump and his wife Melania arrive at the royal palace to improve relations with the UK. The couple brought their favorite Corgi Mitzi, a Texas bitch with terrible makeup. Trump offers Elizabeth to mate Mitzi with Rex – well, that is, how to intermarry, while Donald ordered Mitzi: “Grab some puppy.”
Mitzi dirtyly harasses Rex (approx. Exler: the kids will be delighted), Rex tries to escape from her and at the same time accidentally sinks his teeth into Trump’s personal belongings. A big scandal rises, Rex’s friend Corgi Charlie suggests that the dog run away from the palace for a while until the scandal subsides, and as a result, Rex finds himself at the top of London’s bottom – in a dog shelter where a fight club thrives.
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A long-suffering project, which, I note, would be better not to be born at all – this happens. The original script was written by Rob Sprackling and John R Smith, writers of all sorts of nonsense like Gnomeo and Juliet and Sherlock Gnomes. Back in 2002, the American studio Montecito bought the script, and it happily lay there on the shelf for 14 years.
In 2016, the script was bought by the Belgian studio nWave Pictures, which for some reason is called the “New Pixar”, although it has only low-budget and little-known cartoons on its account, which also regularly fail at the box office.
The script was revised by studio directors Vincent Kestelut and Ben Stassen, changing several key scenes there (mainly in the name of reasonable economy: for example, a magnificent royal dinner turned into a cabal between the queen and her husband and Trump and his wife), they also staged this cartoon.
The trailer for the film was not bad, corgis are very cute dogs, and the audience was expecting a cute family cartoon, where only for the presence of such cool dogs one could put an additional two points in karma.
It all started quite funny – until the moment when the dogs started talking. Then there were still hopes for a cute family cartoon. Then the dogs started talking – and things got noticeably worse.
Then Trump appeared with Melania. I don’t know if this is the creation of American screenwriters or Belgian scoundrels, but if Elizabeth II and Prince Philip are shown as cute, albeit somewhat grumpy old men (Philip is amusingly jealous of his wife for Corgi and touchingly reads the book “How to Kill a Dog”), then Trump with Melania and this terrible Mitzi – such a vicious caricature, completely inappropriate in a children’s cartoon, that the authors would like to wish to burn in a special hell for filmmakers.
Later, when Rex escaped from the palace and ended up in a dog shelter, the scriptwriters began to fully exploit the films and cartoons that they had once seen somewhere, so that all sorts of references and allusions here bloom in full bloom and you can give your head to cut off, which children from all this will understand only Rex’s brazen imitation of the touching bottomless eyes of Puss in Boots from Shrek 2, but all other allusions are past them.
And the huge, constantly silent dog Chief, who then suddenly spoke, and the fight club, and the Rocky-style training, and the materialistic bitch (in the sense of the sex of the dog), who clearly came out of the Disney “Lady and the Tramp”, and Rex’s fight with Charlie from ” Toy Story”, and references to the “Secret Life of Pets” – this will be completely incomprehensible to children, and in adults it is more likely to annoy than tenderness.
Well, a separate cherry on the cake in a children’s cartoon: the dog Wanda, who is listed as the official girlfriend of Tyson’s canine authority, suddenly falls for Rex when he finds out that he really is from the palace, that is, the guy with the money. It is, of course, honest and vital, but it is still better to teach children something else.
So, you ask, is everything in the cartoon so bad? Yes, and the rating on IMDB is completely below the baseboard, this is only put on the finished sludge.
I’ll tell you so. He’s not complete trash. And just not too successful and very imitative cartoon on a stupid script. And there are some things in it that are really annoying, and here it’s just tempting to underestimate the rating – for poor humor (Trump is just some kind of bastard), for ridiculous imitations and for the fact that a cartoon about corgi should be cute and cute. And here somehow it’s almost not cute and there’s little cute in anything – and this is an additional reason for disappointment.
However, there are still some funny moments in the cartoon. Somewhere they still managed, at least they came up with something. But these hilarious moments can’t outweigh the overall disappointment of this undercooked cinematic pancake.
And they advertised it just like a new creation of Pixar. In fact, this is just some kind of nWave Pictures, God forgive me, which performed in its usual style. Well, it is not surprising that the picture failed at the box office: it collected about $ 31 million around the world, and the budget here is clearly about twenty-something million.
In general, Bagel and I are mortally disappointed. Although he liked the scene with the book “How to kill a dog” – he is such a furry scoundrel.
Royal Corgi / The Queen’s Corgi movie meaning
Director: Vincent Kestelut, Ben Stassen Cast: Rusty Shackleford, Joe Wyatt, Leo Barakat, Jane Alan, Dino Andrade, Joey Kamen, Nicole Sherman, Kirk Thornton, Madison Brown, Camila Rhodes
Worldwide gross: $31 million
Animation, Belgium, 2019, 85 min.