Gnome Alone (2017)

How I manage to find animated movies nobody has heard of before I don't know. I do know though that I watch a lot of these movies and they usually suck. Gnome Alone is another of those movies.

The film follows Chloe (voiced by Becky G), a teenage girl who is forced to move constantly because of her mother's (voiced by Tara Strong) job. For this reason, she struggles to make friends and spends all of her time on her smartphone. Things are about to change in the new town as she strikes up friendships with the most popular girls in school. But then she discovers that her new home is inhabited by alive garden gnomes, she soon finds herself in the middle of a centuries-old war between the gnomes and the Troggs, creature determined to eat everything, and must decide between her social/high school life or help the gnomes.

Originally is the first thing that came to my mind as I was watching Gnome Alone because it lacks completely of it. A part of the film's plot is taken straight out of Mean Girls --the whole friendship with the popular girls part, just in case you haven't seen Mean Girls (do such people even exist though?)-- the rest is just something we have seen tons of times before. Only this time around there are gnomes everywhere because apparently, they are a thing now, right? What else could possibly explain all these animated movies with gnomes that are being made recently?

Then there are the characters, just as bad as the plot. Not only they are not interesting nor likeable, not even the main character and her nerdy friend/sidekick, but they are as flat as a board. Characterization? Development? Just like originality, they are nowhere to be found. These characters are just there without actually being there. The villains, other than not being worthy of this name as they aren't that threatening, are pretty much terrible copies of Disney's Stitch from the Lilo & Stitch franchise. The voice acting is pretty awful as well.

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However, and it kind of hurts a little to say this, Gnome Alone isn't a hundred percent rotten. Although it does not compare to Pixar's, the animation is nice. Also, there are some nice songs that work as a distraction --you will probably want to sing and dance to those songs and you'll forget about the film.