Back to the Outback

Back to the Outback

This holiday season, parents seeking an electronic babysitter are likely to promote “Back to the Outback,” an Australian animated movie that drops today on Netflix, as a takeoff on “Madagascar.” Remember those cute movies you loved with the wise cracking penguins and hypochondriac giraffe Billy?! It’s basically that again. I mean, it really is basically that again. Once more, a group of animals at a sanctuary escape their captors in an effort to go back to the wild, forming an unexpected family along the way.

The sanctuary is in Sydney and the destination is the Outback this time around. Add a dash of “Finding Nemo”-esque journeying together with a timeless family film message about not judging a book by its cover and you’ve got a film that feels just slightly too much like it was made by machine rather than actual people. There’s simply too little fresh creative passion here for what is at times adorable but also strikingly programmatic. Everyone accuses Netflix of designing to algorithm more than they do creative ends and these misfit animals won’t help.

The new taipan at the Aussie zoo is called Maddie (Isla Fisher), and she’s been thrown into something called The Danger House with other critters who scare children into realizing lots of nature wants them dead. While pretty koala popular Pretty Boy (Tim Minchin) gets so much attention across property he has his own international webcam where people watch him fall asleep, Maddie learns hard lesson about how appearance affects what folks think about whole species. Denis Leary used to have bit about how we only fought for cute animals: nobody wants to save cows but everyone wants otters because they can swim around and do cute things with their hands. Maddie ain’t no otter.

She learns this the hard way after expecting her trainer Chaz (Eric Bana) to show her off to the visitors only to watch as he leans into the snake stereotypes. She’s not going to take it, quickly banding together with other residents of the Danger House, including a lizard (Miranda Tapsell) and a spider in heat (Guy Pearce). Through a series of mistakes, Pretty Boy ends up on the journey with them as they make their way through Sydney to the Outback, trying to stay one step ahead of Chaz and his son. Directors Clare Knight and Harry Cripps admirably try to inject “Back to the Outback” with a big heart, something Fisher’s emotional delivery notably elevates.

The problem here is a recurring one with recent family entertainment and it’s how little there is below the repetitive surface. Jokes are recycled with alarming regularity, and most of the supporting characters outside of Maddie fall flat. (Think about how wonderfully the writers on “Nemo” realized all the characters on both Marlin’s journey and in the fish tank with Nemo. No such luck here.) Chaz is a broad Steve Irwin stereotype and Pretty Boy becomes an aggressive annoyance, a character given way too much screen time.

There’s a decent message in “Back to the Outback” about not buying into false impressions of an entire species and also in how the downtrodden band together there’s even something called the Ugly Secret Society but good intentions only go so far in family entertainment. I’d like to think that Knight, Cripps, and Netflix set out to make more than just a thinner version of “Madagascar” to satisfy a need of the algorithm of the powerhouse streamer, but I’m not so sure.

Watch Back to the Outback For Free On Gomovies.