Mark Reviews Movies: WONDER PARK

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 14, 2019

Wonder Park begins with a lot of promise. A young girl, with the help of her adoring and adored mother, dreams up a fantastical amusement park, populated with talking-animal mascots and filled with rides that could only come from the imagination of a child. This dream is somewhat put into practice in the real world, where the girl uses her creativity and handiness to recreate that fantasy experience using whatever she can find around the neighborhood.

Kids are like this. Perhaps they're not quite like that on this scale, which has our child protagonist creating a long, winding, and jumping track through multiple backyards and across the entire block. The point remains, though: Give a kid a dream, and they'll figure out a way to turn it into some kind of reality. After the disastrous full-scale attempt, the girl's parents convince her to build smaller, while still thinking bigger.

Then, reality hits. The mother (voice of Jennifer Garner) becomes ill and has to leave home for medical treatment.

In this fairly hasty prologue, the movie does a fine job, through simple juxtaposition (of the real-world planning of the park and the apparent fantasy of the park itself) and an action sequence and a montage, establishing everything that's important to June (voice of Brianna Denski), the imaginative and inventive young girl. There's a real emotional weight, then, when a single piece—the foundation, really—of that life is taken away from her. The model of Wonderland, the park June created with her mother, is packed up, because the thought of a new ride feels like a betrayal and the whole endeavor is simply a reminder of who's missing.

The screenplay, written by Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec, establishes some significant and rather substantial ideas during this prologue, and that potential continues as the real world and June's fantasy one seem to become intertwined. At a certain point, though, the movie loses sight of what's happening beneath the surface of its story and, instead, becomes entirely about its superficial sense of fantasy-come-to-life, broad comedy, and frantic action.

After her mother leaves home and the dreams of Wonderland come to an end, June is left with her father (voice of Matthew Broderick), who signs her up for a summer math camp. On the bus ride there, she comes to fear the idea of her dad alone, overeating and/or getting into some kind of household accident. With a helpful distraction from one of her friends, June abandons the trip and makes her way toward home along a hiking trail.

In the woods, she discovers a roller coaster car, covered in moss and marked with the familiar face of one of Wonderland's mascots. The car carries her to the amusement park, which already has fallen into despair.

The allegorical intentions here obvious, but that doesn't take away from the wistful, melancholy impact of the imagery of June's arrival at the place of her dreams, now abandoned and disregarded—an already distant remnant of when June's life was filled with joy and possibilities. If this sounds overly sad, perhaps it is. It's pretty clear that the filmmakers believed it to be.

Once June arrives in the real Wonderland, the entire tone and purpose of the movie shift. We're introduced to the lovable, kooky mascots of the park: the leader warthog Greta (voice of Mila Kunis), the anxiety-ridden porcupine Steve (voice of John Oliver), the narcoleptic bear Boomer (voice of Ken Hudson Campbell), and inseparable beaver twins Gus and Cooper (voices of Kenan Thompson and Ken Jeong). The park's chief designer, a monkey named Peanut (voice of Norbert Leo Butz) who received inspiration for rides from June's mother whispering into the ear of a stuffed monkey, has gone missing. He lost his purpose and, soon after, was abducted by the chimpanzee dolls that have started tearing down the park piece by piece, feeing them into a swirling vortex in the sky called "the Darkness."

The whole of the story, of course, is about June's imagination and joy being threatened by this looming void of despair, but that, apparently, doesn't stop the filmmakers from distracting us with as much as possible to try to evade the underlying theme of the movie. There are plenty of comic bits involving the mascots, whose broad personalities try to compensate for how little importance they have within the story. Most of the plot is reduced to a series of chases, as June and her animals pals try to outrun the stuff chimpanzees, with faces amusingly stuck in a smile and voices that sound chipper as they cause chaos.

The movie sets up so much in terms of its main character's grief and innovative mind, yet neither of those qualities seems to matter in terms of the actual storytelling. For a story that's about the power of imagination in the face of harsh reality, Wonder Park itself just coasts along on a hollow conflict, a group of jokey sidekicks, and a reliance on action that feels more destructive than creative.

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