Film Review: Rally Road Racers will rev up younger moviegoers

"The animation is top-notch — the Chinese backdrops, especially, are beautifully achieved — and while the story itself is all rather predictable, it all zips along with frictionless ease."

Fri, 15 Sep, 2023 - 13:00

Declan Burke

Rally Road Racers
★★★☆☆
Cinema release

Rally Road Racers (G) is an animated movie that centres on Zhi (voiced by Jimmy O Yang), a slow loris — a small primate, since you ask — who is thrown into the maelstrom of the Silk Road Rally in a desperate bid to save his tiny Chinese village from being obliterated by the property developer Archie Vainglorious (John Cleese).

Aided and abetted by ex-racer and guru Gnash (J.K. Simmons) and fellow loris Shelby (Chloe Bennett), Zhi sets off on a four-day ‘kamikaze mission’ as the Rally zooms along from Kashgar to Shanghai, with the only rule being that there are no rules. Pitched at a young audience, Rally Road Racers is a kind of Wacky Races (ask your uncle, kids) for the 21st century, with toads, goats, peacocks and seahorses all competing for the grand prize. The animation is top-notch — the Chinese backdrops, especially, are beautifully achieved — and while the story itself is all rather predictable, it all zips along with frictionless ease.

Young Zhi is exactly the plucky kind of hero you’d want out there battling on behalf of your imperilled village, and John Cleese seems to be having a ball voicing the ridiculously evil Archie Vainglorious, although the highlight is a sequence in which the animation suddenly switches from eye-popping colour to hand-drawn charcoal sketches to the soundtrack of A-ha’s ‘Take on Me’ (ask your auntie, kids).

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