Roadside Romeo

This is another Indian film though it is merely distributed by Disney instead of being a co-production. It is instead produced by Yash Raj. Indian does not have a long history with animated movies, and it shows throughout this film. Te plot of this movie is a dog, named Romeo, who is abandoned by his owners and forced to live on the streets falls in love with a female dog named Laila and makes various attempts to gain her affection. The characters are largely forgettable. Romeo is an egotistical jerk who suddenly has a change of heart towards the end of the movie for no reason. Laila, on the other hand, starts out as a seemingly strong female character she quickly succumbs to Romeo’s ‘Charm’. The plot is both predictable and cliched and confusing with no clear focus. However, the voice acting is alright, and the singing is good. Moving on to my main problems, the animation quality is subpar. It attempts to be a Bollywood inspired anthropomorphic film complete with numerous, admittedly catchy, dance numbers, but it does not fit the animation. The animals go from standing on all fours where they look find to dancing on two legs where they look off. It would have been better if the characters were human. The dialogue also is a mixture of bad English and Hindi which is an odd combination. I wish they choose one or the other. Now I support other countries stepping into the animation field as competition is great and every country has something to offer to the medium. But this does not mean these early attempts are except from criticism. I hope Indian can continue to get better and eventually produce high quality theatrical animated films. Overall, this movie, while low quality and mostly uninteresting managed to hold my attention as a strange oddity and could be worth watching with that mindset.

Final Rating: 3/10