Top 30 Worst CGI Movies of All Time Part 1/3

Well, with every best list, there's a worst list. It's been a year since I started my blog, and one of the main reasons was to show you my original 'Top 30 Greatest CGI Movies of All Time' countdown, as a tribute to Toy Story's 20th anniversary. Well, here are the Top 30 Worst CGI Movies of All Time.
For this list, I once again made rules for myself. First, the movie has to be 100% 3D CGI, with the exceptions of Walking With Dinosaurs and Arthur and the Invisibles. Second, the movie had to be released in theaters in the US. And finally, the film has to have a score lower than 60% on Rotten Tomatoes.
I did not include Foodfight because I believe that one was direct-to-video (and amen to that). Another reason I excluded it is because many people have already included it in their worst animated films countdowns.
I also did not include Ice Age 5: Collision Course because I have not seen it, and I'm kind of afraid to.
I also didn't include Cars 2 because there are some people I know that like Cars 2.
Now, let's start the countdown!
30. The Lorax (2012)

The Lorax was originally a book written by Dr. Seuss in 1971, and was about a Grinch-like character named the Once-ler, who comes to a forest and cuts down the trees for their soft silk-like leaves. However, as he cuts down the forest, The Lorax, a creature who speaks for the trees, tries to warn the Once-ler about his consequences, but he doesn’t listen. A year later, a TV special based on the book would air on television, with involvement from Dr. Seuss. It was one of the many follow-ups to the cult TV classic How The Grinch Stole Christmas! In 1966. However, this version of The Lorax mangles the original source material and turns it into a WALL-E knockoff with awful songs. This Lorax was produced by Illumination Entertainment, the same studio that previously did Despicable Me. You can tell because the humans in Despicable Me and The Lorax look exactly the same. Also, the forest creatures were diminished to Minion knockoffs, despite coming from the same studio. To make matters worse, The Lorax, this time voiced by Danny DiVito, was degraded from someone we could relate to, to an annoying little pest.

29. Shrek the Third (2007)

In our favorite anti-fairytale ogre’s third big-screen adventure, Fiona’s father, who was turned into a frog at the end of Shrek 2, was walking on his last leg. This means Shrek has to become king. However, Shrek doesn’t want to be king, and goes on a quest with Donkey and Puss in Boots to find the king’s missing nephew Arty. Before the three set sail, Fiona tells Shrek that she’s pregnant, and it worries Shrek even more. Meanwhile, Prince Charming rallies up the other fairy tale villains to take over Far Far Away, kill Shrek, and marry Fiona. Shrek the Third focuses much more on comedy than story this time around, and it does more harm than help. The jokes are disgusting, the plot is a mess, and to be completely honest, the fight with the princesses and the guards is quite stupid.

28. Mars Needs Moms

In Robert Zemeckis's final motion-capture film, Martians are kidnapping moms from Earth so they can raise baby Martians, while the male Martians act like Neanderthals. If you think about it, it’s kind of a knockoff of The Jimmy Neutron Movie. At least Jimmy did it better because in his movie, the parents of Retroville were kidnapped because the Yokians, the alien race behind this scheme, needed suitable delegates to be fed to Poultra, a gigantic three-eyed alien chicken. The Yokians could elect themselves, but they’re nothing but slime in special oval-shaped robot suits. What kind of food is that for an alien chicken? In Mars Needs Moms, however, the message seems rather sexist. Why can’t the female Martians raise the baby Martians along with the male Martians? I find this sad because Robert Zemeckis is the man behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit, my favorite movie of all time, and it’s sad to see him go from films like Roger Rabbit and Back to the Future to a movie about Mars kidnapping moms.

27. Ice Age 4: Continental Drift (2012)

In the unlikely herd’s fourth ‘chilling’ adventure, Scrat reaches the Earth’s core, without burning to a crisp for some reason, and causes tectonic plates to close in like walls in spy movies. Manny, Sid, Diego, and Sid’s grandmother get separated from Ellie and Peaches (Manny’s new wife and daughter) and set sail on an iceberg to get back home. The antagonist of this movie is a pirate baboon named Captain Gutt, with a ragtag team of pirates like an elephant seal named Flint, a kangaroo mistaken for the Easter Bunny, a flat badger who uses himself as a flag, and a female saber-tooth tiger named Shira. Also, WHERE THE HECK ARE THE HUMANS?! There were humans in the first Ice Age, but where are they in the sequels? Blue Sky Studios or 20^th Century Fox, if you’re reading this, please make Ice Age 5: Collision Course the final Ice Age. I just want to see Blue Sky make more quality films instead of unnecessary Ice Age sequels. This situation honestly reminds me of the Rocko’s Modern Life episode ‘Wacky Delly’. I'll explain why at the end of this post.

26. Igor (2008)

Igor is a film about a hunchback named Igor (John Cusack), who works for the evil Dr. Glickenstein (John Cleese). With the help of his companions, Brian, a  robot who isn't very bright with a human's brain, and Scamper, a zombie rabbit, he secretly helps his master make a monster for an evil invention convention. However, Igor's creation Eva (Molly Shannon) is as gentle as a lamb. When Dr. Schadenfreude (Eddie Izzard) hears about Eva, he wants to steal her so he can enter her in the competition and take over Malaria. Igor isn't horrible, but it has awkward character designs, pop-culture references that will fly over viewers' heads, and a storyline that feels like a feature-length episode of Phineas and Ferb.

25. Chicken Little (2005)

Chicken Little was Disney’s first CGI feature to have no involvement with Pixar, and boy was it bad. The movie was a DreamWorks wannabe with three different plots that didn’t mix well: a bully plot, a baseball plot, and an alien plot. I don’t bother explaining the story because it gives me a headache. It’s just sad to see Disney, one of the most reliable animation studios at recreating classic tales, stoop down so low. When the film premiered, it got very negative reviews, but grossed over 300 million dollars worldwide. It’s even been rumored that John Lasseter was horrified by Chicken Little. That’s one of the main reasons Disney purchased Pixar in 2006, and Lasseter became part of Walt Disney Feature Animation, which would eventually be renamed Walt Disney Animation Studios. Thankfully, Disney hasn’t made a CGI film as bad as Chicken Little since.

24. Shark Tale (2004)

Shark Tale is DreamWorks’ worst reviewed animated feature to date, and starred a fish named Oscar (Will Smith). Oscar works at The Whale Wash, a car wash for whales, and is usually a slacker. He owes a puffer fish named Sykes (Martin Scorsese) 5,000 clams, but wastes it on gambling. Sykes tells his jellyfish flunkies Ernie and Bernie to tie Oscar to a rock as his punishment. Meanwhile, a shark named Lenny (Jack Black) is being taught by his brother Frankie how to hunt, because Lenny doesn’t like eating fish. Frankie gets killed by having an anchor dropped on him, and Oscar is declared a ‘shark slayer’. Since Shrek was a parody of fairytale films, Shark Tale was meant to be a parody of mob films, like The Godfather and Taxi Driver. How many kids do you know have seen The Godfather? Also, the fish characters don’t even look or move like fish. Look at this scene from Finding Nemo and this scene from Shark Tale. It’s quite clear that ‘Nemo’ had better character designs and character animation.

This is Finding Nemo...

And this is Shark Tale...

To top all that, Shark Tale even got an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature! How could Shark Tale get a nomination, but not something like Teacher's Pet? I personally think Teacher’s Pet should’ve been nominated instead that year.
23. Planes (2013)

From the mind of John Lasseter himself, Planes, a spinoff of Cars, was going to be direct-to-video. However, when a screentest was shown to Disney, they felt like it was suitable for theaters. Instead of being produced by Pixar, who were busy with Monsters University and Inside Out at the time, Planes was produced by DisneyToon Studios, the studio that did almost every unasked Disney sequel and the Tinkerbell films. Anyway, Planes is about a crop-duster plane named Dusty, who dreams of becoming a racer. With a stroke of luck, Dusty gets to race in a big race around the world with Ripslinger, who thinks Dusty is nothing but a crop-duster, and will stop at nothing to prevent Dusty from winning the race. Planes is an animated film that should’ve stayed direct-to-video with an overused plot, one-dimensional characters, and stereotypes in every country they visit.
22. Space Chimps (2008)

Oh, Glob. These movies just keep getting worse and worse. Space Chimps, the third film from the short-lived animation studio Vanguard, is about a trio of chimpanzees who journey into Outer Space to retrieve a missing space probe. They land on a planet inhabited by aliens that… Well, they look like a cross between the Smurfs, the Care Bears, and the Grinch.
 
The bully of the bunch is named Zartog, and uses the probe to torture the other aliens. Space Chimps has amateurish animation, a ridiculous plot, characters flat as cardboard (but not literally), and is full of pop-culture references and monkey puns. In fact, because of the film’s poor quality, I once had a dream that my grandmother gave me Space Chimps on DVD for my birthday, and what followed was a sequence of galaxies within galaxies, slot machines with never-ending screens, and stuffed animals that sang ‘Schneedlehow Schnuff-time’.

20. Planet 51 (2009)

Planet 51 is an animated film about a human astronaut named Chuck Baker (Dwayne Johnson), who crash-lands on a planet inhabited by Shrek-like aliens. The aliens all freak out, except for a teenager named Lem, who hides Chuck in his bedroom, so the alien government won't find him and test him. Planet 51 is a mess with an overly familiar storyline, stock characters, and pop-culture references that don’t mix well, though the animation is half-decent.

I compared Ice Age's sequelitus to the Rocko episode 'Wacky Delly' because, in that episode, Ralph Bighead has finally finished The Fatheads, which ran for 893 episodes. Ralph personally wants to quit the animation business so he can make real art. However, the TV executives, who are literally a bunch of pigs, demand Ralph to make another TV show. Ralph comes home and tells Ed and Bev Bighead, along with Rocko, Heffer, and Filburt, about the news. Heffer says that making a cartoon looks so easy and that his next show could be about deli meats. However, Filburt says that an idea like that would get Ralph Bighead fired. This gives Ralph an idea: He lets Rocko, Heffer, and Filburt create the new show, called Wacky Delly, hoping it will be so bad that the network executives will have no choice but to cancel it and fire Ralph. The result is this.
 
Wacky Delly actually becomes a big hit, and Ralph tries everything to sabotage the show, even by melting the polar icecaps so they can hopefully flood Bighead Studios, which actually doesn't work. Ralph eventually confesses to Rocko that he wanted to get fired so he could make real art. Rocko, however, encourages Ralph to make the best cartoon it could be, instead of running away from it. However, when Ralph actually does make a quality episode of Wacky Delly, parodying the mushroom dance from Fantasia's The Nutcracker Suite, people actually hated it, and Wacky Delly was cancelled.
 
Ralph gets fired the next day and says "You cretins! You don't know what art is! I'LL SHOW YOU!" After 10 years, Ralph Bighead finally finished his masterpiece: a replica of a fruit bowl carved into a mountain.
Back to the Ice Age side, I feel like in this situation, Ralph Bighead represents Chris Wedge, founder of Blue Sky and director of Ice Age 1, Robots, and Epic, Rocko represents Carlos Saldana, director of Ice Ages 2 and 3 as well as the Rio films, Filburt represents Steve Martino, director of Ice Age 4, as well as Horton Hears a Who and The Peanuts Movie, and Heffer represents Mike Thurmier, director of Ice Age 5. Also, the pigs in this situation seem to represent Fox, as the Ice Age films make an insane amount of money worldwide. I just hope that this situation ends with a happy ending and Chris Wedge gets to make his masterpiece, in the form of 'Monster Trucks'.

Okay, maybe not a masterpiece, but it's gotta be better than Ice Age 5. And in case you're wondering, Blue Sky WILL NOT be involved with Monster Trucks, but will be directed by Chris Wedge. Blue Sky's next feature, Ferdinand, based on the book 'Ferdinand the Bull' by Munro Leaf. will premiere Christmas 2017.