It’s early 2005, and the sixteenth season of The Simpsons is well underway. The episode Mommie Beerest sees Marge becoming Moe’s unlikely business partner. In the middle of the episode, Marge and Homer go to the movies, where they watch the trailer for the latest DreamWorks flick, Cards. Of course, that was just your usual Simpsons joke. No one would produce a movie about sentient objects just for the sake of making a few puns and casting a few guest stars, right? Fast forward two decades, and we have Sneaks.
A Movie About Talking Sneakers?
On paper, Sneaks should have been great. The movie has Rob Edwards at the helm, the screenwriter responsible for Treasure Planet and The Princess and the Frog. He also wrote the screenplay for Sneaks, and had one of the veteran animators from Who Framed Roger Rabbit as a co-director, Chris Jenkins. That combination alone should help sell the movie with animation fans, but wait! There’s more. The cast is absolutely packed with talent: Anthony Mackie and Martin Lawrence lead the charge, with Laurence Fishburne as the antagonist. The supporting cast is also positively star-studded, with a collection of DJs and singers lending their voice talents – and also Keith David, who could have marketed the movie by himself.
It all sounds great, right? By all accounts, Sneaks could have been a celebration of sneakerhead culture in the same league as Coco became a tribute to DĂa de los Muertos. Unfortunately, those hopes fall flat once you actually sit down to watch the movie for more than one second. That’s when you realize Sneaks isn’t a movie: it’s an insult to animation itself.
If Looks Could Kill
Saying the animation in Sneaks looks dated would hold true even if it were still 2005. The movie looks like an unholy blend between Foodfight and Grand Theft Auto IV. Actually, scratch that – Liberty City on the Xbox 360 looked leagues better than whatever Sneaks is trying to sell us as the Big Apple.
Despite being just talking shoes, every animation looks weird and out of sync, as if the characters were essentially weightless. I’d go as far as to say that Miles Morales’ Air Jordan 1s in Into the Spider-Verse looked better than anything Sneaks has to offer, and they weren’t even the focus of his suit.
How Could This Happen?
Sneaks is so unequivocally terrible that I began questioning my sanity midway through the film. How could a team as talented as Edwards and Jenkins, together with an incredible voice cast, come up with such a failure of a movie? And that’s when it hit me: the weird animation, the lackluster character designs, the sheer lack of originality in the presentation… this was the same animation studio that produced Norm of the North. Now everything makes sense.
Granted, even Pixar would have a hard time turning this script into a love letter for sneakerhead culture (sorry, Rob Edwards). Still, with a better team working on the animation, Sneaks could have been at least pleasant to look at. Maybe get some work done on the shoes so they resemble their real-life counterparts. Unfortunately, Assemblage Entertainment didn’t deliver with this one. It’s grim to say this, but I think Norm of the North looks better – and that’s a sentence that’s never been said before.
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