If you saw the poster to the right, you might say, "Well, Paddle Pop seems like a pretty strange name for a movie, but it looks like a reasonably legitimate movie."
However, if you lived in Australia and you saw the poster to the right, you'd say, "Huh? They made Paddle Pop into a movie?"
See, Paddle Pops are actually a type of ice cream bar here. They're an ice cream treat that comes on a wooden stick (or "paddle"). And the lion seen prominently in this poster is their mascot.
That there should be a movie about this lion -- who takes the name Paddle Pop in the movie, completely unironically -- and that the movie should be nearly 90 minutes long, is just plain ridiculous.
Oh yeah, then there's this -- from what I've been able to glean from walking through the room during the four or five times my son has been watching it, it's actually sort of good. Not just the digital animation, but the actual writing, not to mention the incredible amount of world-building that goes into it.
Incredible for a movie about an ice cream pop mascot, that is.
How did we come into possession of such a movie, you ask? Well that's even more interesting. They were giving them out at the zoo. For free.
Or maybe that's not more interesting, as maybe the only way to get people to acquire such nakedly promotional materials is to give them to them. But it's interesting because they did put so much money and thought into the movie, only to have it hit the marketplace as a freebie.
What strikes me as a little bit weird is that Paddle Pops don't seem to particularly require an additional marketing push. They are one of the most readily available of summer treats, and I see kids eating them constantly. It's almost like if the world's leading soft drink company made a movie about an elf wizard who can control carbonated substances like Magneto controls metal, and called that hero "Coca Cola."
It just goes to show you how cheaply you can make good looking CG. I mean, I talked about how much money they put into it, but the thing is, maybe they didn't put a lot of money into it. Maybe your average joe can cook up something that looks this good these days. I mean, once you've got the software that automatically figures out the shadows based on the location of the light source, half the job is done, right?
I'm kind of wishing now I had waited to write this post until after I'd watched it. Normally I wouldn't give something like this my attention, but maybe I need to find out just how good it really is -- just how many worlds they really did build.
And if I do that, maybe The Audient will ultimately have two posts about a movie based on an ice cream treat.
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