La crítica norteamericana implacable frente a ‘Planet 51’

En su estreno en el fin de semana más taquillero de EE.UU., coincidente con el del Día de Acción de Gracias, la crítica norteamericana ataca sin piedad a la producción española de animación más ambiciosa de todos los tiempos. En taquilla, se sitúa en el box office en cuarta posición, con una recaudación de 12,6 millones de dólares.

The North American premiere of the most ambitious Spanish animation production of all time, Planet 51, could not have started on the wrong foot for the critics who have been dedicating all kinds of niceties in the previous days. At the box office, still without closing definitive data, the film produced by the Spanish Ilion Animation would have obtained a gross of 12.6 million dollars (8.4 million euros), placing it in fourth position in the preferences of the Americans behind the new installment of Twilight: New Moon, The Blind Side (both premiered, this weekend) or 2012 (in its second weekend on screen).

Distributed by Sony and with a major marketing plan, Planet 51 has been released on the highest-grossing weekend (coinciding with Thanksgiving) in the US a week earlier than in Spain, on a total of 3,305 screens.

Fierce criticism

With a majority Spanish production, Planet 51 is directed by Jorge Blanco, Javier Abad and Marcos Martinez, has had a script by one of the writers of the Shrek saga, Joe Stillman, and a budget of 55 million euros. Planet 51 turns traditional alien schemes on its head by turning a human astronaut who lands on a planet inhabited by green beings into a 'weirdo'. Unlike other recent releases with a 'made in USA' stamp such as Up or Ice Age 3, the critics have been relentless.

These days in the American press we can find niceties such as the one dedicated by Variety where one of its columnists, Todd McCarthy, goes so far as to affirm that Planet 51 is a "stupid animated film that even children will interpret as an insipid joke about conventional science fiction... There's nothing funny, provocative or engaging." "There's nothing funny, provocative or engaging about what Shrek co-writer Joe Stillman and the team at Madrid-based Illion Animation Studios have done," Variety reads.

For the Los Angeles Times, the story is "pleasant but flagrantly unoriginal that shows an almost criminal lack of small details that constitute a story" highlighting an "excessive and excessive scatological humor" in allusion to the references made in the film to the typical "poop, ass, pee".

For its part, one of the newspapers that most influence Americans when choosing which film to go see that weekend, the New York Post, has assured that 'the whole atmosphere of Planet 51 is wrong' asking ironically 'in which time capsule has this script been?'.

USA Today calls it "funny, but only if you're in Planet Denial," The Washington Post headlines it as "Planet 51, lost in space," Village Voice assures that "this mediocre movie is like ET but backwards."

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlH6M7WY27I[/youtube]

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