Oddball – Retter der Pinguine (2015)

Oddball – Retter der Pinguine: Directed by Stuart McDonald. With Shane Jacobson, Sarah Snook, Alan Tudyk, Coco Jack Gillies. An eccentric chicken farmer, with the help of his granddaughter, trains his mischievous dog Oddball to protect a penguin sanctuary from fox attacks in an attempt to reunite his family and save their seaside town.

“It was W.C. Fields who said, u0026#39;Never work with animals or children.u0026#39; He may have had a point because the actors in this film become almost irrelevant when Oddball, a beautiful Maremma sheepdog, shares the screen with the fairy penguins.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe film is based on real events. Apparently, Middle Island off the Victorian coast at Warrnambool, used to be home to a thousand fairy penguins until foxes started to snack down on them, reducing the population to just ten of the little guys.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eFinally, a chicken farmer, Swampy (Shane Jacobson), and his dog, Oddball, come to their rescue and rid the island of foxes after hunting and trapping had failed.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe film is described as family fare, and Oddball steals every scene he is in, but I think children would be a little restless with the amount of story taken up with the affairs of the adults. Maybe the filmmakers tried to cram in too much. Along with the case for conservation, every character in the film seems to have a back-story. But itu0026#39;s all at the expense of more time with Oddball and the real stars of the show – the fairy penguins.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eNo doubt the scenes with the penguins would have been hard to do, but the film could have used a lot more of the confrontation between Oddball and the foxes – there are few long shots and much of the action seems either very close-up or off camera. Here and there the film gets to the heart of the matter – the human drama canu0026#39;t compete with the tension in the scene on the island when the fox sticks its head into the fairy penguinu0026#39;s burrow, or when Oddball saves the egg from going over the cliff.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eAlthough no rival to u0026quot;Babeu0026quot;, u0026quot;Oddballu0026quot; is nicely made, and no one will hate it, but I feel that the filmmakers missed the opportunity to make it more memorable than it is.”