The Bad Guys

The Bad Guys (2022) is about a gang of animal criminals trying to be good. The crew is five: a wolf, a snake, a shark, a spider and a piranha. What frightens people is not what they do but what they are; when the wolf approaches a child the child screams, and nobody is reacting to him being a thief. They are caught after a large robbery. Professor Marmalade, a guinea pig, makes an offer: he will train them into good citizens. The governor agrees. The plan is a trick; the crew intend to go free and pull the real job. Then Wolf helps an old woman and she thanks him. It has never happened to him before and it disturbs him. The idea is being marked. Nobody has ever expected anything good from them, so they have never tried. It is adapted from Aaron Blabey's children's books. The visual method was new for DreamWorks: full photorealism is dropped, the lines are visible, the movement breaks as though hand drawn, and the backgrounds have a watercolour texture. It belongs to the period after Spider-Verse when animation changed direction. The heists are deliberately staged like the Ocean's films: the plan, the crew, split screen. Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron and Awkwafina provide voices. It did well commercially and a sequel followed. The twist in the plot is obvious to adults from the start. It runs 100 minutes. Good for: family animation, heist comedy, and visual design. Less good for: the story is predictable and the message is delivered very plainly.