Movie review: 'The Great Wolf Pack' (2022)

The Great Wolf Pack ®: A Call to Adventure is a 45-minute 2D animated mini-movie produced in 2022 by Great Wolf Resorts, an American chain of family-friendly hotels featuring indoor waterparks. Most of the animation was outsourced to Mexico, directed by Chris Bailey and written by Kent Redeker. The IMDB page mentions an additional writer I couldn't find in the closing credits, M.J. Offen.

The movie is for young kids and can pretty much be skipped. There's a group of young animal friends in the forest: Violet the wolf and Sammy the squirrel (action girls), and Oliver (a raccoon tinkerer who always talks using the most loquacious and unnecessarily wordy vocabulary), who are joined by newcomer Wiley (the coyote wolf), and finally Brinley, a young bear with self-confidence issues, who of course gets chosen as the Special One by a spoon-wielding spirit and is given the Magical Rock to guide them on their quest.

Wiley (voiced by Brandon Winckler) is initially set up as the main character who's all into -adventure- and -being cool-. Turns out he's also got an enormous lone-wolf ego that only loosens up at the end, uugh. Violet and Sammy are the most sympathetic characters. The movie spends a lot of time with everyone riding around on magical waterslides (branding!). There's a run-in with a friendly elderly otter and evil "glorps" that don't really contribute anything, but hey, it fills six minutes of screen time.

Spoilers:

The gang eventually ends up in a swamp, where there's a a conflict between frogs and "borples" (shaggy trolls). Everyone gets along in the end. The only real bad guys were the glorps, who stopped being relevant to the plot almost immediately. Once the quest is fulfilled, the spirits whisk the gang back home, and everyone gets a gold star - er, magical rock, setting them up for future adventures. They're now a "pack", despite only 40% wolf content.

It's free to watch on YouTube, but seriously, you can give this one a miss. Notable weird moments were a hypnotic dance solo and someone wiping their nose on the mayor.