Animator Pierre Perifel's feature-length directorial debut, The Bad Guys, borrows from live-action caper films like the Ocean series starring George Clooney, who is actually referenced in this gem of a film.
Sam Rockwell's Wolf (as in Big Bad) and his motley crew of stereotypically miscreant critters (Snake [Marc Maron], Shark [Craig Robinson], Tarantula [Awkwafina], and Piranha [Anthony Ramos]) have been living lives of crime because the world doesn't expect anything better of them. They're marginalized hard cases.
When Wolf gets a pleasant tingle from doing a good dead in the midst of a heist, the team's efficiency and esprit de corps becomes threatened and they end up as experiments for a Professor Henry Higgins-type guinea pig (voiced by British actor Richard Ayoade) who promises to try to turn the bad into good over the skeptical objections of Gov. Diane Foxington (voiced by Zazie Beetz).
As has been true for the best animated work from the DreamWorks studios, The Bad Guys has an engaging maturity in its humor that will miss young children in the audience. However, adults might actually reflect on its mesages about fear and assumptions in a world where half the people are scary and the other half are scared.
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