Arctic Justice: Neon NZ Review

Voice cast: Jeremy Renner, Heidi Klum, John Cleese, Alec Baldwin, Anjelica Houston
Director: Aaron Woodley

Sometimes, animated family fare is simply a story and some animation, no deeper message, and nothing more profound to espouse.

So it is with Arctic Justice (known globally as Arctic Dogs), a climate change awareness piece with lashings of self-belief served up for an audience.

Arctic fox Swifty (Renner) is a wannabe delivery dog in the small Arctic township of Taigasville.

Yearning to be "put to the test, so he can deliver his best", Swifty has gone most of his life unnoticed, other than by his polar bear friend PB (Baldwin, solid and gruffly warming) and by his potential love interest and town engineer, Jade (Klum, relatively one note).

When the dogs of the ABDS delivery service go AWOL, Swifty gets his chance to step up - but uncovers a wider conspiracy, masterminded by walrus OVW (Cleese, in raspy maniacal mood).

Arctic Justice feels very familiar, with its animation recalling many other elements of prior films.

A despot in the form of OVW with Puffin helpers? Very Minions and Despicable Me.

A mate who even looks like a whiter version of Sulley from Monsters Inc, lead foxes who look like they could come from Zootopia, there's a distinct feeling of deja vu in this animation.

There are some zanier touches from James Franco's Lemmy, an albatross who's a few fish short of a picnic, but they're few and far between and really needed more of them to be inserted throughout.

While the climate change message is present, it's hardly pushed down people's throats, but it becomes ever more clear toward the end as Swifty and his pals face an extinction event for their town.

Worthy messages of being more than "just" a somebody work nicely too, and while some adults will identify with the slight at the monotony of jobs, Arctic Justice does enough for the younger kids to keep them happy throughout - but potentially not the adults.