The Three Failures of Doogal

Welcome to another installment of Out the Box.

Hey, remember the movie Doogal? No? I thought you didn’t. The movie is perhaps one of the most forgettable ones that don’t leave much of an impression. For those who don’t remember or don’t know about it, let me explain: the movie Doogal was an animated feature based on the popular French television show called The Magical Roundabout. In fact over in United Kingdom and French, the film was simply known as the show’s namesake. The premise of the film’s plot, according to Wikipedia, “concerns a dog named Dougal (Doogal in North America) who has to save his best friend, Florence, as well as the whole world, from being frozen by an evil spring named ZeeBad.” Sounds like a good if not decent movie, eh? I admit when I first heard about, my interest was piqued and I had at one point considered seeing the film. But I didn’t and rightfully so when I occasionally look back on it.

The film was originally released in the U.K. and French in 2005. In Great Britain, it was particularly favored as it gained positive reviews and earned a decent amount of money. According to Wiki, the movie was praised for its charm and superb animation. So with a film that successful, naturally they want to release it to other countries. You would think it would achieve equal success, right? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Why is that you may ask? Three simple reasons in which I will care to explain in no particular order based on my research. While I haven’t seen the movie itself, just small clips a few years ago, once you finished reading you will understand why the movie was a failure in the states.

First Failure: Americanizing some of voices.

Sigh. Was it even necessary to change most of the voice actors? I mean, really necessary? I can understand if it was and English dialogue translation for a foreign film like with most of the Studio Ghibli films and even Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but the voice actors of The Magical Roundabout were English speakers. Sure they were primarily British and therefore the dialogue itself may have included terms we as Americans would not understand (i.e. jumpers as opposed to sweaters), but still they spoke English. The main reason I believe they did that was just to including an all-star celebrity cast that most American people already recognize. While I generally don’t have a problem with that, here it was just stupid. When you look at films like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and a majority of the Pixar films, while the cast will have some known celebrities playing said roles, there are some good castings of either relative unknowns or actors we haven’t seen in quite sometime. Even so, they have still done well as a result. Heck, even District 9 has done well considering most of the actors in the films are not that well known. Of course, the thing with all-star casting is that it has to work to make it believable, instead of a marketing ploy to entice the audience to see the movie. If the story is appealing and decent, it in theory could work. However, with Doogal, it did not. The film still became a box office bomb despite the all-star cast. Look, Butch, you’re not John Lasseter or Pete Doctor, so unless the film itself has characters speaking the native language of the film’s origin country, consider other alternatives or just leave the casting of the original as it is.

Second Failure: Use of things not in the original film, notably toilet humor and pop culture references.

Back when the first two Shrek films were released, the creators had the brilliant idea of including various pop culture references, which made the films all the more funny as we can often relate to the sources. However, at the same time, it can be a rather stupid idea, especially if the pop culture reference is out of place or makes no sense. Also if you are simply throwing pop culture references all over the place just because it’s trendy or for no reason whatsoever, it’s not going to be funny or creative at all. It just becomes tired, horrible, and uninteresting, like most of Rob Liefield’s artwork and the Star Wars text crawl and transition wipes. Unfortunately, this was the case with Doogal. In the future, filmmakers, please don’t toss in random pop culture references and expect it to be funny and creative. Jokes and references don’t work like that. You have to have a valid reason for doing so and if you can’t think of one, just don’t bother.

Lastly, another point along the same lines—the toilet humor, particularly the presence of flatulence jokes. Was there in ANY way necessary to have that when the original film DIDN’T at all? Sure one can argue about this film as a children’s movie and therefore it’s okay in that regard. I’m sorry, that is NO excuse. There are plenty of children’s movies and television shows out there that don’t rely on toilet humor to push the jokes, for example the Emperor’s New Groove, the earlier seasons of Spongebob, Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, and Animaniacs. Those rely on smart humor that is both funny and subtle all at the same time without it being over the top. With from what I’ve read about those kinds of gross jokes in Doogal, it wasn’t funny or amusing. It was just an unsatisfying and cheap attempt to get a laugh. And oh, how cheap it was. For future reference, when thinking of ways to inject humor into a movie, do it in a clever way where both children and adults can enjoy. And if you in some strange way want to include a gross gag, even though the original film doesn’t have any, leave it alone.

Third Failure: People not familiar with the source material.

I was going to put down changing the title, but as experience shows us (and I’m looking at you Golden Compass and Sorcerer’s Stone), this isn’t a major problem as long as the content is the same. Admittedly, I put this low on my list, but it is a factor in one way or another. In the United States, we never saw The Magic Roundabout because it’s exclusively available in France as well as the U.K. unless you happen to come across someone who is a fan of the show and has shown it to you. At least with some things like Harry Potter, His Dark Materials Trilogy, and a large majority of the Japanese mangas, you can say that publishers were smart enough to release the first novel, book, volume, or whatever so that they’ll know if the general public will like it enough to follow the series and therefore become profitable as a result. Why not do the same thing with The Magic Roundabout? The networks can release a fair number of episodes about a year or so in advance. That way people will become familiar with it and will be excited to see the film. Of course, even if they aren’t familiar with the source, perhaps sometime during or after the film’s release, the company or network can simply air the show that movie was based on because the film generated such an interest within the audience. Either way, you get the same result and more people will likely watch the film more.

There you folks have it—the Three Failures of Doogal. We can all learn something about the American release. And it can be summed up in the old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The Magical Roundabout was fine the way it was and didn’t require any bastardization of any sort to make it successful to a larger audience. My advice—if you are really curious about the film, I suggest you find a copy of the original UK/French film and avoid the cluster crap of an American release.