Making fun of Shitpig feels a little like heckling toddlers’ form on their first day of soccer practice, but that has never stopped me before. The casting is this weird amalgam of comedians and then completely random YT stars. The story itself is kind of off-brand on-brand IP no one wanted from Berkeley Breathed, the writer of children’s books that dads in the early 90s read to their children to piss them off with long-winded drug-induced plots that don’t quite seem like they were properly tested for children, and not in a “oh this is so edgy” way, but more of a “is this more the text of a user manual than a story for children” way. Here are some things to know about Shitpig. The main character of this movie is called “Hitpig,” like “hitman,” but for a pig, and like any hitman, his main job is to find lost animals and return them to their owners. You know, classic hitman stuff. Everyone else in the movie has a name, by the way. It’s not like they all go around calling each other by their occupations: there’s Pickles, the elephant (objectively funny name), Bertha, and Polecat (played by RuPaul), who I guess is maybe actually a polecat?
Here’s just a taste of the kind of movie this is. RuPaul at one point in the film powers the spaceship with his atomic farts, which he creates by eating Mexican food and then inserting his ass into a hole in the back of the ship. It’s just kind of cringe, the whole thing.
Rainn Wilson plays a kind of convolutedly evil villain, the son of circus entertainers who feels some poetic anxiety about meeting the high bar set by his family’s acts, who gets weirdly fixated on a specific routine where he is caught by an elephant, but his weight makes it impossible for this to happen, which really just begs the question why is Hannah Gadsby giving the green light to this script?
The animation feels weirdly kind of low budget, like someone stripped down the models from other animals in other movies and slapped them together in a few days, but Hitpig’s face is weirdly wrinkly like they tried to make him look photorealistic while everyone else is straight out of Horton Hears a Who. It’s not dissimilar to the art style of Berkeley Breathed’s other works, intentionally grotesque juxtaposed next to the cartoonish, which is an aesthetic, just not one that seems to work well with children. The universe of this script contains references to the Mandalorian and Taylor Swift, but it doesn’t really have the sustained energy to continue pop culture references past the 30 minute mark. There might even be a Taylor Swift song in the soundtrack, but most of the music in the movie feels erratically arranged, like someone was asked to pull together songs on a shoestring budget after blowing the vast majority of the funds on one Swift song.
There’s some (I’m using this word a lot in this review but it’s hard to think of any other way to put it besides) weirdly dark stuff in the movie too, like the scene that could’ve otherwise been pretty cartoony, where Pickles floods a random house but she can’t swim so she gets stuck on the top floor and then basically drowns save for the fact that she receives hours of mouth to mouth resuscitation. Sort of hard to explain that to the Gremlin watching, but also kind of a WTF premise for a scene in general.
It feels a lot like this was a movie conceived to help a few actors make rent, but also maybe to count as a write off for some multinational entity which funded the whole operation. It displays none of the discipline, none of the attention to what children actually want, and so many questionable casting choices it’s hard to believe there are other films coming out of this production house any time soon or ever again, except as a joke or straight to streaming.
