SNOW BUDDIES - DVD review

As you may know, even though Disney has always been a family oriented studio, they decided about year or so ago to pursue the family market even more vigorously than before. As a result we have seen an upswing in the number of Disney Channel specials, teen witches, "High School Musicals," and Hanna Montana episodes to hit DVD.

The "however" of this scenario is that their definition of "family" pictures is not exactly the same as my definition. When I think of family pictures, I think of movies the whole family, young and old, can enjoy equally, movies like "Snow White," "Mary Poppins," and "The Chronicles of Narnia." But it appears that Disney's idea of "family" is to target specific younger age groups, like early grade-school boys or preteen girls. Put 2008's direct-to-video "Snow Buddies" in the very youngest "youngsters" category.

Written and directed by Robert Vince, "Snow Buddies" is a live-action adventure sequel to "Air Buddies" (2006), a distant relation to the "Air Bud" series (1997, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2003), and a stepping stone to "Space Buddies" (2008). Do you detect a pattern here?

The Disney folks have clearly aimed the "Buddies" pictures at the juvenile set, and in that regard they probably work just fine. But I'm an adult, and I cannot guess how any child will react a movie; therefore, I will continue to review and rate such films from my own point of view; or, rather, from the point of view of an adult looking at these new releases in the context of previous Disney family classics. In that regard, "Snow Buddies" seems pretty much like a routine, uninspired, paint-by-the-numbers entry in the field of children's cinema.

The story involves five golden retriever pups, the "Buddies" of the title, whose father was "Buddy" from the first "Air Bud." The dogs now live with five different families in an idealized little town in Washington, where a sign reads "Welcome to Fernfield, Where Everything Is Possible." I expect that is to remind that this is going to be a fantasy.

The first thing to which the movie introduces us is each of the pups and their owners, and then the two parent dogs. The animals, played for the most part by real-life dogs with some CGI manipulation, speak to one another in English but not very convincingly, hardly moving their lips in doing so and showing little or no expression. The pups are Mudbud (voiced by Henry Hodges), owned by a middle-of-the-road type kid; Buddha (Jimmy Bennett), owned by a transcendental meditating kid; Rosebud (Liliana Mumy), owned by a little girl; Budderball (Josh Flitter), owned by a rich kid; and B-Dawg (Skyler Gisondo), owned by an athletic, Dude-talking kid. Each dog takes after its owner, and if I heard one more "Dude" from any of them, I think I'd scream. Tom Everett Scott and Molly Shannon voice the two parent dogs, Buddy and Molly.

The pups are amazingly cute. The kids are amazingly cute. The movie is amazingly cute. I was cute'd out in the first ten minutes. When the kids go off to school, they leave each of the pups on a front lawn to run freely around the town. I hope the filmmakers didn't intend this to be a life lesson for youngsters to let their own puppies roam free. It's an invitation to disaster.

Mostly, the pups chase after cats and after one another, scampering around before the movie's far-fetched central conflict kicks in. You see, the pups climb into an ice-cream truck's refrigerated container in search of treats, and the ice-cream man drives it to the airport and to an airplane bound for Alaska, where the pilot unceremoniously dumps it from the plane via parachute into the deep woods. What are the odds? OK, it's a children's fantasy. The movie shows the container with the pups inside hurtling down through space and tumbling every which way before the chute opens, all the while cutting to the pups inside who are not being jostled at all. Did anyone think of editing this thing?

Once safely in Alaska, we meet the main human character in the film, a (cute) little boy named Adam Bilson (Dominic Scott Kay), who wears his hair longer than his mother's. Do real little kids really still wear their hair shaggy long to their shoulders, or is it only in the movies to make them look even cuter? In any case, Adam dreams one day of entering a local sled-dog race, but he's only got one dog, a pup named Shasta (Dylan Sprouse). He desperately needs five more dogs and prays (literally) to get the dogs he needs. And the pups fall from heaven.

The rest of the movie is about how Adam finds the pups and they work really hard and they enter the big race. Six tiny pups pitted against full-grown dogsled teams. Keep saying: It's a children's fantasy, it's a children's fantasy.

Also in the cast, for reasons I could never understand, are a St. Bernard named Bernie (James Belushi), who is the Alaskan town deputy sheriff; a legendary old sled dog named Talon (Kris Kristofferson), who lives in the mountains and tutors the pups in sled racing; a tough varmint named Jean George (John Kapelos), who is a rival sled-dog racer and a no-good Nick, a stereotypical villain; and a mean-spirited Siamese cat named Miss Mittens (Whoopi Goldberg), who terrorizes the pups back home. Plus, there's an old coot sheriff, an idiot deputy, an Eskimo (or Inuit to be more correct), an igloo, and a sled full of other clichés.

"Snow Buddies" moves along at the pace of frozen molasses, and it's just as sugary (at least, when it isn't indulging in dog-fart gags). Even the background music is sugary. The filmmakers calculate every scene to be an "ahhhh" moment. And, of course, there are morals everywhere: "Sometimes helping others is the surest way to help yourself" and working together as a team beats selfishly thinking only of yourself.

As I say, for the youngest members of the family, the movie is sure to please. For everyone else, I dunno.

Video:
The colors are exceedingly bright and showy in a high-bit-rate, 1.78:1 ratio, anamorphic transfer. Indeed, the hues are probably too bright for real life, but they seem to fit the cartoonish nature of the film. Even more in the transfer's favor, it treats us to an exceptionally clean screen, the wide expanses of pure-white snow looking just that--pure white--with hardly a trace of print grain or noise. Add in some fairly sharp definition, and you've got a video pleasing to the eye.

Audio:
The first thing a listener notices about the Dolby Digital 5.1 reproduction is a good deal of musical ambience enhancement in the rear channels. Unfortunately, there's little else to commend it, as the soundtrack is mostly bland and homogenized, like the movie. It has plenty of stereo spread, and it's quiet where it should be, but it hasn't much range--dynamic or frequency--or much impact. So, it does only what it has to do and not much more.

Extras:
First up among the disc's bonus materials are about three minutes of staged bloopers, most of which try to outdo the coyly mannered antics of the movie. Following that is an item called "Buddy Bites," a full-length audio commentary by the Buddies that sounds as though the actors were reading from a script. Obviously, the studio was leaving nothing to chance. Then there is a music video, "Lean on Me," by Disney Channel star Mitchel Musso; it's hard to recognize the young man's singing for all the loud accompaniment that surrounds him. And, finally, there are two featurettes: "Dogumentary," seven minutes with the dogs telling us about how they made the film, and "The Magic of Visual Effects," five minutes on, uh, visual effects.

Things wind down with sixteen scene selections and a chapter insert; Sneak Peeks at a dozen other Disney products; English, French, and Spanish spoken languages; and English captions for the hearing impaired.

Parting Shots:
You ask, How could anybody knock a film so lovable as this one? Well, it took me three hours to get through the film's eighty-seven minutes, not counting the extras, if that tells you anything. I'm sure "Snow Buddies" is just fine if you have five or six-year-olds in the family, but I would not want to be one of the parents who has to watch it with them. It's nearly an hour and a half of terminal cutesiness that for this adult wore out its welcome very fast.