English Dub Review: The Old Man

Overview:

Three young children are dropped off by their parents to spend the summer with their grandfather in the old country. Disappointed to be in the countryside, these children are in for plenty of surprises as this village has dark secrets. As everyone relies on a steady stream of milk for survival, it is the milkman’s job to squeeze the cow daily. However, as exampled decades before, if a cow goes one day without milking, it will explode. And now, the children have incidentally released their grandfather’s cow, and it is up to them to get it back.

Our Take:

For something entirely different for North American audiences, The Old Man is the crown jewel of Estonian animation. Released in 2019, this film created by Mikk Magi is apparently all the rage in Estonia (a tiny country in Northern Europe). As strange as it sounds, The Old Man has done surprisingly well on the film festival circuit, enough to earn an English Dub.

The story centres around three young children abandoned by their parents to spend the summer with their grandfather. Chaos ensues, including the grandfather almost dying, the destruction of a music festival, and plenty of fart jokes. However, the main plot involves tracking down a ticking time bomb of a cow ready to explode its milk all over Estonia.

While not up to the same par as American content, The Old Man surprisingly delivers on the humour. Arguably, one too many animals get stuck in other animals’ butts, yet there is some originality to the juvenile jokes. Honestly, not many movies can get away with milking a rooster or having a man blow inside a pig’s butthole and squeezing the farts out, but supposedly, nothing is off the table in Estonia.

The animation is divided. While scenery and details are done exceptionally well, the characters and animals look uncomfortably unfinished. The Claymation style people look so awkward it is almost stomach-turning. It reminds me of the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, which had a grotesque-looking Yoshi egg that looked disturbingly close to my mother’s meatloaf. Needless to say, I could no longer watch that classic video game adaptation nor eat my mother’s meatloaf ever again. And this movie’s unrefined animated characters brought up many of those nostalgic turn-offs.

Thankfully, there was enough light-hearted humour and race-against-time adventure to make this movie watchable. The film is filled with randomness, like a tree god looking to get its rocks off and a rock star (who I could not confirm was from a real Estonian band) playing the gig of his life inside a bear’s colon. It all surprisingly builds a cohesive film, enough that it is the most successful animated movie from a country we can barely point out on a map.

As far as recommending this film, it’s only worth the time if you are genuinely interested. It makes sense that the movie did a round of film festivals as it promotes animation and media for a rarely-represented country. However, the average audience member is not missing anything ground-breaking unless you consider a man half-buried in a cow’s butt as revolutionary. Regardless, this was still better than some of the garbage that gets pumped out in America these days.