"Zoo-wee-mama!"
I know if I was a bit younger I would likely have grown-up as a huge fan of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. Four live-action films were made in the 2010s and there certainly seem to be a generation that are quite attached to them. This though is an animated adaption of the first book in the series.
Greg Heffley is about to enter middle school with his best friend Rowley Jefferson. Armed with scare-mongering advice from his older brother, Greg struggles to maintain his friendship with the childish Rowley for fear of being bullied. The greatest fear of all though is the terrible cheese touch.
This short film seems to be quite unpopular with fans of the live-action films but they are clearly not the audience this is aimed at- it's squarely for pre-teens like the main characters and the books. The books' author Jeff Kinney was heavily involved with this production- he wrote the script and produced the film- so this is fairly faithful to the source material. It's perhaps surprising even so that some plot points from the book don't appear here and it's not like there isn't room for them given this is only an hour long.
The animation style takes Jeff Kinney's 2D drawings from the books and turns them into 3D animation. I think it's a style that adults generally don't like with the characters not really looking human at all.
But that's sort of the point- the narrative comes from the perspective of the main character and so the whole film is his version of what happened, from the way he draws real people to a presumably exaggerated version of reality. I think this is one of the reason's Jeff Kinney's books became so popular in the first place- he has a fantastic ability to get into the mind of an eleven-year old and their mindset.
This isn't destined to go down in history as a a much-loved family film but it's a decent adaption of the book that pre-teens will enjoy. Kinney intends to adapt all his book in this way and a sequel has been confirmed so we can expect to see plenty more of the wimpy kid in the coming years.
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