Open Season 2 (2008)

"Open Season", a 2006 Sony Pictures Animation production, turned out to be one of the more polarizing computer animated efforts of the past decade, and knowing that before I finally saw it for the first time just several months ago, four years after it came out, I wasn't surprised when I found it to be a mixture of good and not so good. The quality certainly wasn't enough to make me feel the need to watch this first sequel, "Open Season 2", right away. If the original had been much weaker (or probably even just a little weaker) than it is, I doubt I would have bothered watching this 2008 sequel at all. However, I have now seen it, and unfortunately but unsurprisingly, it can't even match the quality of the somewhat bland original.

Boog the bear and Elliot the mule deer now live in the forest together with several other animal friends. The deer has grown new antlers and is about to get married to Giselle, but before the wedding, he is very upset when he accidentally breaks those antlers. At the wedding, Elliot finds that he isn't quite sure if he wants to marry Giselle anymore. Meanwhile, Mr. Weenie, a domestic dog who escaped into the wild, has found a trail of dog biscuits left by his owners, Bob and Bobbie, and can't resist the temptation to eat them, so he eats along the trail and inevitably gets caught by his owners, who take him away in their RV! When Elliot sees this, he tells the other animals at the wedding, so the ceremony is cut off, and the deer sets out with Boog, Giselle, and several other animals that live in this forest on a mission to rescue Mr. Weenie. While they are on this mission, the dog they're looking for finds himself back with a group of other tame dogs led by Fifi, a toy poodle who hates wild animals!

When I watched the original, it seemed to me that the backgrounds looked more primitive than those of any other CGI animated feature I had ever seen. Well, the backgrounds in this sequel are the same. So, the animation is one of the flaws in "Open Season 2", but it's certainly not the only one. I didn't find the first "Open Season" THAT funny, but I hardly watched any of the gags in this sequel without keeping a straight face. Elliot takes Boog's place as the main protagonist here, and his freak-outs and such are generally not funny. That's also the case with the antics of Bobbie, Mr. Weenie's over-affectionate owner (I can see why Mr. Weenie wouldn't want to live with her), and the other characters who are supposed to be funny. The occasional toilet humour also doesn't work, though that's not to say that toilet humour is never funny. I would say the plot of this first sequel is also a bit bland, and I definitely didn't find as much excitement in it as I did in the plot of its predecessor, even if I occasionally found some of it.

This was the first movie I watched after "Monster House", another CGI film which Sony Pictures Animation was also involved in the production of, and I have to say, that film is much better than both of the "Open Season" ones I've seen. "Surf's Up", another Sony Pictures film, the one which led me to watch "Open Season" last November, also far exceeds the 2006 anthropomorphic wildlife feature from the same company in quality. Even though "Monster House" and "Surf's Up" haven't spawned any sequels and "Open Season" has now spawned two, the other two CGI animated films I've mentioned are clearly more popular, which I can understand perfectly. "Open Season 3" has recently come out, but I'm certainly in no hurry to see it, and I'm sure NEVER seeing it wouldn't be a great loss, as it seems to be even less popular than this second installment. Even if you like the first film a lot more than I do, this first sequel could still be disappointing to you, which I guess is very often the case with sequels.