Review: Aroha Bridge “Stealing the Show”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Hollywood visits Aroha Bridge and begins casting locals to take on type-casted roles in an effort to be inclusive. While Kowhai is the one who dreams of fame and fortune of being on the big screen, her always hungry brother Monty is the one that ends up getting the fame with his numerous cameo roles as a guy trying to rob a store. Unfortunately, the role gets to the head of the local residents who are inspired by Monty to commit all sorts of crimes which causes mass arrests and hysteria.

That may sound bad, but it’s their cousin Angeline that has to go into hiding after a public scandal that sees her donning disguises and hiding out with the Hook family until the coast is clear. By the end, the Hook family gets the fame that they were looking for, but was it worth all of the trouble?

Our Take

Created and mostly voiced by New Zealand’s Jessica Hansell, Aroha Bridge is definitely a series that has a bright future ahead of it. Featuring the voice cast of Rizván Tu’itahi (“Monty”), Mum (“Madeleine Sami”), Dad (“Frankie Stevens”)  is what happens when all the kids live at home in a Maori household which surprisingly not all that different being from the United States. A bunch of same sensibilities that can be seen with this NZ family can certainly be found in American animated comedies like The Simpsons, Family Guy, and others. And like those series, Aroha Bridge will need to smooth some rough edges in the mouth animation department to truly take that leap from web series to full-blown TV series. That said, the grittiness of the character designs for Aroha Bridge feels like something you’d see from the turn of the millennia era MTV animation like Undergrads or Downtown, not unlike a feature film that came from Titmouse or Bill Plympton.

I’d like to see the series break out of its web series roots a bit. The first episode of the show’s third season really comes off more as three animated shorts tied together with a very loose thread binding them together to make them a cohesive unit, and would prefer that for a 27-minute runtime we really milk the plots that kick off the episode to a more satisfying conclusion. In any event, Aroha Bridge is not far off from some of the stuff you’d see here in America, and may even deserve a chance to get some extra production dollars so as to deliver a more concise and contemporary effort.