Something to watch tonight: Friday 3 October

Wonder Park (Brown, 2019)

It has been a heavy week so, with rainy school holidays in mind, here’s something for all the family. Just landed on Netflix in Aotearoa New Zealand is an easy to underestimate animated film that I described back in 2019 as: “a surprisingly effective way to introduce your child to the concept of how unhappy they might become later on in life.”

That’s from a review I wrote for RNZ:

11-year-old newcomer Brianna Denski is the voice of bright young June Bailey, a child with a vivid imagination that has been encouraged and nurtured by her parents, especially Mom (Jennifer Garner). She builds an imaginary theme park featuring a cast of characters inspired by the toys in her bedroom. When Mom gets sick and has to go away, June spends more time worrying about her rather helpless Dad (Matthew Broderick) and loses interest in Wonder Park.

Packed off to Math Camp in the hope she might get her engineering mojo back, June skips off and on the long walk home she discovers, deep in the woods, the real Wonder Park, fallen in to ruin and in desperate need of some love and care. Her bedroom toy friends, come to life, are worried and only June can provide a solution – if only she could realise it.

Even though it looks like the kind of film that’s going to be spending every noisy moment trying to sell you something, Wonder Park turns out not to be that at all and parents should be prepared to have some deep and meaningful conversations with their little ones on the car ride home.

Incidentally, we should be very grateful that in New Zealand we get the complete US voice cast rather than the Australian or UK stunt casting which features breakfast DJs and YouTube stars over actual actors1.