Jungle Trouble review – utterly charmless kiddie cartoon patches together corpses of animations past

The Guardian

01-07-2025

With a supremely annoying lead character called Mohsen, here is a jungle adventure that feels sewn together like a cruddy Frankenstein's monster from the corpses of other shoddy animations – which themselves are patched together from far better films. The plot takes in the antics of various interchangeably charmless critters, but none more unappealing than Mohsen, a child with a grating voice who wants to be a superhero despite being basically unsuited to the job description. Everything here is so far down the ladder of what family animation can offer at its best.
The script is perhaps the worst offender, with the ugly character design running a close second. Maybe it worked better in the original Persian, but you can tell without checking that it's been poorly translated into English. The lyrics of the limp Auto-Tuned songs barely scan, and rightly or wrongly you suspect the hidden hand of AI or Google Translate. If a flesh-and-blood person was responsible, you'd think they would be ashamed of the lines such as: 'As we ran and played through our fun and exciting escapades, we listened to the story of the kind man's special ways.' It's a toss-up whether the songs or spoken dialogue are worse. The characters spend most of the time either bickering in tiresome quip-coded back-and-forths, or else having utterly unearned heartfelt moments where they say things like: 'I wish he wouldn't go extinct.'
There's a lot of bad animated stuff out there, and in some ways this is only the latest and dumbest. But only by banding together and sticking to watching the well-made stuff over the slop can audiences convince producers to stop slinging this kind of slop our way. Vote with your eyeballs; look away now.
Jungle Trouble is in UK and Irish cinemas from 4 July.