Turbo, the story of an under-snail

In this new universe created by Dreamworks, the life of a garden snail is a little different than we’re used to, as Theo (Ryan Reynolds) and big brother Chet (Paul Giamatti), work at “The Plant,” where they work hard in a tomato garden, doing the things snails normally do. In the evening, however, Theo likes to pretend he’s racing in the Indy 500, watching his hero Guy Gagne (Bill Hader), win race after race on TV. Theo also practices racing, and is up to 36 inches in 17 minutes. Big brother Chet, thinks he’s crazy for thinking about such things, but this doesn’t put Theo off.

Theo, due to an accident, ends up on a freeway, where he ends up on the hood of a drag-race car, after racing on the car for a spell, he slips back, and is sucked into the engine, and after swallowing some nitrous, can now go extremely fast. Watching Turbo (as I’ll refer to him now) find out what his new additions was one of the funniest parts of the film, as his eyes light up, then his rear end, but when the music comes pumping out at an inopportune moment, I almost doubled over!

Turbo
Director
David Soren
Cast
Ryan Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, Samuel L. Jackson
Release Date
17 July, 2013
Influx Grade: A

He eventually gets picked up by Tito (Michael Peña), who, along with big brother Angelo (Luis Guzmán), run a small Taco truck, Dos Bros Tacos, where to pass the time, Tito races snails. C’mon, animations are allowed to have ridiculous coincidences like that! Turbo meets a wonderful array of racing snails, who make up quite a collection of characters, like the funny White Shadow (Mike Bell), who slides into shadow rather ineffectively, while saying his name, or Whiplash (Samuel L. Jackson), whose character was probably the funniest of the bunch.


The real stars were Peña’s Tito and Reynolds’ Turbo, as they form a silent bond, and also get through the brotherly relationship bumps, that life throws at you sometimes. The animation itself was near flawless by Dreamworks, and am yet surprised at the amount of expressive features the animators always seem to find, on any creature they get to work with. The way the eyes were used in Turbo was actually very clever, and allowed for lots of additional humor. I loved the way the snails dealt with mortality, as their numbers were constantly picked off one by one, thanks to the crows. This is another winner from Dreamworks, and I liked the cast, but as usual, it was the characters, rather than the story, that won me over, and I can see this animation gaining in popularity, as it seems to have had a slow start. Well, it is a story about a snail I suppose.

Nav Qateel

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