DVD Review: The Littlest Angel (2011)
The Littlest Angel is a CGI animated film that was apparently adapted from a children's book. I had never heard of the book nor had I ever heard of this film until I was offered a review copy, but I was willing to give it a shot. When my wife and I first turned it on, we were kind of surprised by how crude the CGI was for a feature length film. Even TV shows such as Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Transformers: Prime look better, but perhaps the simplicity was a style choice as this is clearly aimed at young children.
The story is about this little kid angel named Littlest Angel. He lives in heaven and is supposed to be training to become a full angel, but his heart isn't into it and he usually ends up causing problems for the headmaster. Now, the headmaster is kind of a jerk, but I assume it's because Littlest Angel keeps trying his patience. There's one scene where Little Angel is trying to tell the headmaster that there was a dog in town, and the headmaster just calls him a liar because dogs have their own area of heaven and thus is completely impossible for a dog to ever want to be in town... or something stupid like that. What kind of heaven is this?!
Anyway, after Little Angel talks with the Angel of Peace, he realizes that he really misses Earth and this homesickness is probably what's causing his distractions, so after talking with some animals (because all animals can talk in heaven) he goes down to earth to locate a box he hid when he was a living little boy. Inside the box are treasures that remind him of his childhood on earth, so once he gets the box he will finally be able to concentrate on angel training. This plot seems a little weak to me, but I'll go with it.
So while on earth, Littlest Angel gets in some trouble, and the headmaster (along with his brawny-but-brainless sidekick) head down to rescue him. Lessons are learned and you'd think that's the end but then it keeps going when they get back to heaven because it turns out that today is Jesus's birthday and Littlest Angel had no time to get Jesus a gift since he was AWOL on earth... because yeah, it's so extremely important that Jesus gets even more gifts in addition to the tons piled up from all the other angels. I understand that they wanted to have a moral of giving is good kinda thing, but this just kinda seemed shoved in there.
The first time my wife and I tried to watch this, we both ended up falling asleep. The next day I went back and finished it without here, as she had no desire to continue it. This might keep young ones entertained, but I don't thing there is a whole lot here for an older crowd. It wasn't funny or exciting or suspenseful or adventurous, it was just a simple story with simple characters. I was hoping there would be an extra feature on the disc about the original book, but the only extra feature is an advertisement for Michigan, where the film was made. So unless you have really young kids, say 6 and under, I'd have to say skip this one.
