4.16.25 - The Animated Diary of a Wimpy Kid is Not Very Good
I watched it the other day. My main problem with it is that it doesn't really capture the mean spiritedness and selfishness of Greg, or the sort of deadpan humor of the book. To be fair, I don't think the live action movie capture the latter either, but it does get Greg's character right. The live action movie is a good translation to the screen.
The animated movie on the other hand––well its a missed opportunity. The format has the opportunity to more closely capture the book's spirit but it just doesn't. And its ugly too. It seems to hew to this trend to make young characters a bit cuter, a little more forgiveable and sympathetic, to take their "edge" off. This sort of forced neotinization. You see it with the MCU Spider-Man. You see it with the new adaptation of the Ninja Turtles. You see it everywhere. Kids/teens can't have that "edge" they used to in media depictions. They're presented as sort of adorable. Greg is too cute in this. Yes, he is actually eleven in the books, but his "voice" in the books isn't really someone you root for or someone you think is cute. That's what makes it funny, it shows a kid as they often are--a little sociopath. I do think this has to be softened a LITTLE bit for the screen, because a movie has to achieve something fundamentally different than a glorified comic strip. I think the live action movie does a good job at making us care about Greg while depicting his fundamentally flawed character, IMO.
Anyways, I think I'm over the whole "depict kids as cute little kids" thing we're seeing. Peter Parker is kind of supposed to have jerkish qualities, and he's supposed to have some sexual energy---fifteen year olds have these things. The TMNT are supposed to have a sort of dirtbag teenager vibe. And Greg Heffley is supposed to be a bad person. I know there was this whole discourse against how teens were often portrayed as adults, and by adults in the early 2000s, and how they were oversexualized, and I do agree with some of that. But somehow, a lot of that still felt a little more real than this sanitized version of childhood that's being depicted lately.
You know what's a good depiction of school years? Glee. And Stranger Things. And Freaks Geeks. Those feel honest. But also, maybe the nature of childhood/teenhood is changing. I've seen data that kids are more shielded, take less risks, have less sex, get driver's licenses less, and drink less than they did even ten years ago, and a lot less than Gen X or Millenials. So maybe these new depictions are just tracking a cultural change. Maybe we're all just babies longer.
For what its worth I don't think that's a good thing.
knxnts