Review: Big City Greens the Movie: Spacecation

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The Green Family finally saves up enough for a road trip, but instead of the one from last year, Cricket ends up leading them all on a mission in space that goes off the rails. Also it’s a musical!

OUR TAKE

This past week, I’ve been watching a bunch of stuff at least partially associated with shows I have never watched and finding myself feeling alienated or out of the loop on a lot of stuff I wasn’t originally aware of, which definitely had an impact on whether or not I was able to enjoy what I was watching. To my pleasant surprise, that is not the case with Big City Greens the Movie! Of the more recent Disney animated shows, I leaned more towards the more serialized ones like Amphibia and The Owl House (who could honestly use a movie more, but I digress), and so never really watched much of Big City Greens aside from small clips here or there or the rare opportunity that I had to review it, but I always got the sense that I would probably like it if I did. Thankfully, this movie was written with newer or less experienced viewers in mind, so even if you’ve never seen the show before, or just very little like me, you can jump in and be immediately made accessible to just about everything the show has going on aside from some of the more continuity laden bits.

In this case, as the title implies, the down to earth Greens end up taking a vacation into space, inadvertently fulfilling the sketchy goals of an insane tech mogul, and things kind of escalate from there. All of the main cast get some fun thing to do, but the character stuff really boils down to Cricket, who wants to have a fun vacation sometimes at the expense of his family, and his father Bill who wants everyone to be safe. I’m not sure how much the two clash in the main show, but the way the conflict is handled here works pretty well within the self-contained movie, along with other characters reflecting the ups and downs of playing it safe versus having an out of the box idea. And as mentioned, they decided to make it a musical for whatever reason, with the songs apparently being written as far back as the Covid-19 pandemic (ya know, when everyone had a LOT of free time), so it’s nice to see some good came out of all of that. Also, to be frank, I just really like this style of comedy in animation, much like how it was handled in Amphibia, so that’s always a plus. Maybe I’ll give this whole series a go now that I’ve seen this movie, but in the meantime, even if you’ve never seen an episode, I’d say give this a shot. But also, Disney, you could do worse than giving Amphibia and Owl House a movie too. You can even make it a musical, don’t act like you haven’t thought about it!