Oddsockeaters (UK Rating: PG)
Oddsockeaters – released across the UK via Thunderbird Releasing on 26th March – is a children’s animated film from the Czech Republic that answers the often pondered question, “Where do our socks go?” It’s not the strongest premise and, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t really hold up. What results is a children’s movie that may hold the attention of much younger children, but after the age of six or so, it’s likely to leave children feeling a bit too bored.
The film follows Hugo, a young Oddsockeater that discovers he has family living in a villa after the passing of his grandfather. He manages, in the process, to get himself involved in a war between ethical Oddsockeaters and an immoral gang that believes in stealing the whole pair of socks. It would be a modest lesson on sharing for a children’s flick if it weren’t so poorly managed.
The first problem is the Oddsockeater’s themselves, who are remarkably creepy. Looking like some David Lynch nightmare, it’s hard to really care what happens to these monsters when they are so difficult to look at. Additionally, thanks to the film being dubbed, the dialogue is delivered at a rapid and sometimes unintelligible pace, making it tough to often follow what’s even happening. This is epitomised by the Professor who has spent his entire life trying to prove the existence of the Oddsockeaters. His time on-screen is insufferable, his behaviour erratic, and his dialogue delivered with the express purpose of getting it out of the way as quickly as possible.
There’s also a surprising lack of consistency, even for a children’s piece. Sure, children’s movies can often leap logic without much regard because kids don’t typically care. However, in Oddsockeaters, the logic leaps result in just bad storytelling, and while your kids may not care, it doesn’t excuse them. The most obvious one is why the Oddsockeaters hide. When one character discovers that some humans can see them, it makes you wonder why he ever bothered hiding in the first place if he didn’t know his life was in danger.
Oddsockeaters is merely passable beyond this. The plot is fairly boring, the characters all speak in the same cadence and, while they sound different, it’s too often that they don’t sound distinguishable. The jokes generally aren’t anything special, and the musical numbers are short and difficult to understand, resulting in the songs sounding like a garbled mess. Oddsockeaters is probably better in its native language but, sadly, this dubbed version is more irritating than anything else.
