Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Back to the Outback’ on Netflix, a Talking-Animal Cartoon Rife With All the Usual Comedy and Adventure

This week in Talking Animals What Never Shut Their Damn Yaps is Netflix’s Back to the Outback, an animated comedy in which a multitude of celebrities provide voices for snakes, spiders and other dangerous Australian animals who are sick and tired of getting a bad rap just because their venom and/or mouth daggers can murder the snot out of you. Isla Fisher, Guy Pearce, Eric Bana, Tim Minchin, Kylie Minogue, Keith Urban, Jacki Weaver and a pile of others remind egocentric Americans that they’re Australian with their island-continent brogues as their colorful characters start in the zoo and [INSERT MOVIE TITLE HERE], flinging one-liners and syrupy sentiments with equal willy-nilliness. Will we care? Or is this just another generic Netflix cartoon?

BACK TO THE OUTBACK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: An Australian wildlife park outside Sydney has a helluva tagline: “Home to the cutest animals in the world” is its boast. It’s a highly Instagrammable place and, perhaps apropos of nothing, that rhymes with “flammable.” OK, t’s not literally so, but symbolically, because the park is run by Chaz (Bana), who likes to manhandle his totes adorbs terrifying creatures as throngs of onlookers gasp and faint. Maddie (Fisher) is a taipan snake whose venom, Chaz blusters, can kill 100 people in 10 seconds, which would be quite a feat, since it would require biting and envenomating 10 people per second. Do the math, Chaz! Anyway, Maddie’s a very sensitive and sweet snake, just like her best pals, an anxious scorpion named Nigel (Angus Imrie), an escape-artist thorny devil lizard named Zoe (Miranda Tapsell), a somewhat horny funnel-web spider named Frank (Pearce) and a big croc named Jackie (Weaver), who’s the matriarch of this motley crew of unhuggables, who just wanna be hugged.

None of the animals is particularly pleased with this situation, which frequently requires that annoying wannabe Dundee/Croc Hunter dope thrusting their fangs and spines in the faces of screaming children, something you’d think would inspire issues with the insurance company. That’s not all – adding further insult is the existence of Pretty Boy (Minchin), an internationally famous, koala who’s so lusciously ambrosial, kids line up for his photo, he has a Nobel Peace Prize on his shelf and Freud would put his ego in a display case. It sure would be totally nutbutters if Maddie and co. ended up stuck with Pretty Boy as they journey through bustling urban centers and across blazing deserts, running into a rogue’s gallery of other ugly-on-the-outside/squishy-on-the-inside animals – bats, sharks, Tasmanian devils, dung beetles – as they try to get [INSERT MOVIE TITLE HERE], with that douche Chaz on their tails, wouldn’t it? Theoretically.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Weirdo animals escaping the zoo to get back to their roots is a premise lifted wholesale from Madagascar. Maybe the filmmakers will come up with something more original if they dare to make Back to the Outback 2: The Dung Beetles’ Revenge.

Performance Worth Watching: I’m sure Minchin thoroughly relished the opportunity for a throwaway one-liner meta-joke about getting to meet the Pope.

Memorable Dialogue: Disregarding the multiple incidences of the movie title being word-for-word quoted in the dialogue, I’ll settle for Chaz’s hardcore-survivalist commitment to finding his escaped animals: “We’ll face danger, we’ll face death, we’ll drink each other’s urine!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Thankfully, our survival of this movie isn’t contingent upon consuming our own gross bodily excretions, although we will have to endure a tarantula-puke scene. Back to the Outback is mostly generally perfectly acceptable formulaic family-movie fodder. It’s colorful and looks nice, but so do a bevy of Dreamworks, Netflix and Sony animation efforts that will go unnamed here because they failed to distinguish themselves and we therefore forgot they existed.

Very few of those movies are particularly offensive, but they tend to cover the same territory: zingy dialogue, dollops of sentiment, needle drops, pop-culture references, celeb cameos, poop and vomit jokes and a fast-paced, action-packed, cliff-dangling finale that’s too loud by half. This particular film covers thematic fodder about the importance of making one’s own family, the desire to find one’s roots and the idea that one’s beauty comes from within, all stuff that one should find depressingly familiar if one has seen more than one movie in one’s life.

Outback does some things right, maybe in its HIGHLY CONTROVERSIAL anti-zoo subtext, and more likely in its noticeably shifting points-of-view: The reptile and bug protagonists see themselves as wide-eyed, emotionally delicate and complex creatures, although when directors Clare Knight and Harry Cripps shift to human perspectives, they’re hissing, threatening monsters. Of course, the underlying idea is, they’re as scared of us as we are of them, so can’t we all just get along, and maybe invite sharks over for tea and constructive dialogue instead of vilifying them all the time? You know, what’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? That’s a perfectly fine message, but the bigger question is, can’t the movie get it across without a vain koala trying in vain to make us laugh, and recurring Phil Collins references?

Our Call: I’m being a tad too harsh. Back to the Outback is an adequate time-waster for young audiences, even if it’s not particularly original or funny. Parents won’t quite need to shoot themselves with a tranq dart to survive it, but it probably wouldn’t hurt. STREAM IT, just don’t expect much.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream Back to the Outback on Netflix