Moshi Monsters: The Movie
The Moshi Monsters website, where children adopt their own monsters and explore the virtual world of Moshi, has achieved massive success, gaining one user per second at its current peak in popularity. The brand has since expanded to include a bestselling magazine, plush toys, music releases with Sony and a Nintendo DS game entitled Moshi Monsters: Moshling Zoo, which spent a record-breaking 15 consecutive weeks at number one in the DS charts. The website has been praised for its dedication to online child safety and has won a Bafta – now it has been adapted for the big screen.
Moshi Monsters: The Movie follows six main characters: Katsuma, Poppet, Furi, Diavlo, Luvli and Zommer as they travel through the wacky world of Moshi to gather the items set as ransom by the evil Dr Strangeglove, who has stolen the rare and precious Moshling Egg.
The first half of the film is expositional and laced with flat dialogue, while the plot doesn’t really get going until the second half. The characters that the audience are supposed to emotionally invest in are two-dimensional and underdeveloped, even for a children’s film, so the perilous situations faced by the protagonists have little dramatic effect.
There are moments of surprising humour, mainly provided by Fish Lips, Dr Strangeglove’s sidekick, but these moments are too few and far between. The film somehow still manages to feel like a website, lacking the necessary degree of animation to draw its audience into the world it strives to bring to life. With animated films constantly upping the ante in visual terms, and employing increasingly witty and interesting scripts, it is a market in which Moshi Monsters: The Movie doesn’t hold much weight. However, with the brand’s strong following the film will surely achieve reasonable commercial success, and it is a commendable fact to note that the funding and the production of the film were all UK-based.
Iona Thomas
Moshi Monsters: The Movie is released nationwide on 20th December 2013.
Watch the trailer for Moshi Monsters: The Movie here:
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