Now that I have some more time, I can continue my analysis of the movie.
In my honest opinion, the Yellowbellies are nowhere near as bad as the true villain of this movie: LAZINESS. When I watched this movie for the first time, everything screamed rushed and halfassed. The plot? I could tolerate the gang helping the three Yellowbellies find the place they were trying to get to, but Berry Valley? It seems like the writers just took Great Valley and switched the Great with Berry. The whole deal with the Wisdoms is what killed the plot for me. They seemed like a random attempt to put something new into the franchise that hasn't been done yet, but really these were things that they could have been learning throughout the entire span of the movies. Did they really have to be crammed into this one story? I think if the movie stuck with the Yellowbellies plot and just developed it a heck of a lot more, it would have been fine. The majority of the adults aren't even included in the movie all together, although I will give it credit for putting some if any focus on Grandma Longneck, as for me it seemed like she was getting pushed aside in the later sequels for Grandpa Longneck. The writing itself? I don't think Sandra Oh and Cuba Gooding Jr. are to blame for their characters. You could tell they gave it their best effort, and they weren't terrible with their acting. They were just given really bad writing direction. In fact, the writing for all of the characters seemed a bit sluggish. I think the producers were trying to relate this movie to the humor that kids were becoming more used to lately, which probably would explain the first and only (at least as far as I remember) fart joke in the franchise's history. Does this mean the acting was terrible? No. Like Gooding Jr. and Oh, all of the voice actors made the best of what they were given. What about the songs? I actually don't mind "How Do You Know", as I think this song did the best job of trying to tell the message the confused movie was attempting to make. "Say-So" and "Yellow Belly Bounce" both suffered from the same lazy writing. I will admit that both of them actually had fairly decent tunes, just terrible lyrics. "Yellow Belly Bounce" would have been a really cool song if it were written better. I know, I can't believe I'm defending these songs the way I am, but they are nowhere near as bad as "Oops Eeps".
I've ranted on a lot about this movie, but I wanted to give it another chance. Basically to sum it up, this movie suffered from lazy writing, as it was clearly released as one desperate attempt to generate a profit on a seemingly dying franchise. It's bad enough when the TV series for the franchise is not released until the time of the 13th movie. As such, this movie had a lot of things against it. Is it a good movie? As a kids movie, it's tolerable, but as a LBT movie it certainly is not as good as it should be after so many years of these movies coming out. It is sad that this is the last of the movies, but at the same time based on how it turned out the next movie might have been worse off.
