User Reviews

This IS the best spark plug productions movie. The story is fair, voice acting is good for spark plug's standards and the animation is passable. It's defiantly better than Piper Penguin. But i'm not saying it's good.

I had great expectations for this movie. And it started out funny. But these expectations quickly evaporated as the movie is simply BORING practically throughout! And the animation is stiff and crappy. It has good themes - and the filmmakers obviously had good intentions - but they ruined it. Miserably. Had they given the idea to, say, Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki, then you might have had a winner. As it is, the film is a hard loser. Young kids will like it, but you will be bored out of your brain.

There are definitely worse animations out there than 'The Adventures of Scooter the Penguin', at least this had its heart in the right place even if execution elsewhere was severely wanting.

Regarding target audience, 'The Adventures of Scooter the Penguin' is most likely to appeal to very young children or people who don't demand too much but older children and adults are going to find little that sustains interest.

Credit is due to 'The Adventures of Scooter the Penguin for having a well-intended message that doesn't feel shoe-horned in or too preachy, and its teaching of important values, again while not exactly subtly or originally done this reviewer didn't feel preached at.

Sadly, everything else is done on such an amateurish level, with the three main issues with 'The Adventures of Scooter the Penguin' being that it looks cheap, it's dull and that it's annoying. The animation is simplistic at best and even for low budget incredibly cheap-looking at worst. The backgrounds are not too bad, there is at least a sense of time and place and there is the odd nice bit of colour and detail but the backgrounds do lack vibrancy on the whole and consist often of a few basically-drawn objects. Colours are flat and the character designs are both blocky and choppy in movement, with some of it also looking incredibly delayed such as in Scooter's daring rescue attempt.

A contender for the worst asset of 'The Adventures of Scooter the Penguin' is the soundtrack. It's repetitive, often annoying and just doesn't stop no matter whether it fits with the action or mood or not (mostly not, being too jaunty or sounding like it'd be more at house in a low-budget film from 25-30 years earlier. It's over-bearingly recorded too. Older children and adults are likely to squirm in embarrassment at some of the dialogue, that is so awkward and cheesy that it's not even good enough for unintentional laughter. The narration from the professor is especially grating. Despite good intentions with the messaging and values, the story just doesn't engage, the predictability would have been forgivable if the storytelling didn't drag so badly.

Or if the characters were easy to relate to or engage with. Neither is the case here, with some being very bland and generic and others like the professor penguin character being supremely irritating. The voice acting is poor, with all the characters being voiced too broadly, as well as with no feeling, and some with overdone and obviously fake accents.

In conclusion, well-intended message-wise but 'The Adventures of Scooter the Penguin' on the whole is cheap-looking, dull in how its story is told and annoying with the soundtrack, the characters and how they're voiced. 2/10 Bethany Cox