It’s time again for Spots to review animation she should have seen forever ago but only just saw! Also, I should have separated these two articles into separate reviews, but I really wanted to make that pun with the title, haha.
Spoilers abound! Probably moreso than my other reviews, these have a lot of spoilers. My commentary doesn’t make sense without knowing the story. Consider yourself warned!
100% Wolf: About 70% Good
This one is a really tough one for me to rate. The parts that are good are really good and would easily make a rewatch list. But the bad parts are distressing. Let’s dive in a bit further.
My first nitpick: wolves have pups, not cubs. I don’t know where that comes from; maybe the creators were hitting e61 a bit too hard.
Also, if Flasheart had just let the ice cream man fall, he wouldn’t have been “killed”, and the ice cream man couldn’t have started a werewolf obsession, so all-in-all that would have been a 2-0 win. Then we have Uncle Hotspur, or as I called him extensively in my notes, “Wolf Scar”. I am genuinely surprised he didn’t just toss Freddy off the cliff after his father.
Batty is a combination of Angel and Dolly, and I mean this in the best possible way. Seriously, I don’t know how she can manage to radiate so much good energy, but she does. I have nine entries in my notes that literally just say “Batty cute”. How was she not the first one picked at the pet shop? I would have taken her in a microsecond!
The pound was a genuinely well-executed atmosphere. Cruella Down Under here making wigs out of dogs was unexpected. I did take note of the “wig store opening soon” when Freddy and Batty were walking around town, but I didn’t know they were going there with it!
I was really hoping the monster in the basement was Flasheart and I was so happy to be right. That reunion was genuinely lovely. But I skipped over a bit. Actually, I skipped over what brought this down from an 8 or even 8.5 out of 10 to my debatable 7.
The peeing scene.
That was so uncomfortable to watch. Wow.
I mean, in-universe it makes some amount of sense, and it’s not like I couldn’t see this happening in real life. It wasn’t disbelief. It was just… discomfort. The Guardian called this scene “funny”. Funny. I don’t consider myself to be a prude, but maybe I am on this sort of thing. (I also don’t typically link to other reviews in my own, but I felt that one needed a real citation.) I don’t know. There’s a tinkle scene in one of my graphic novels. It’s not like this sort of scene can’t be done properly! Maybe it was just that this one hung around too long.
The other thing that confused me about this film is why the werewolves hate dogs. Hotspur seems to be “Lion King racist” towards them, but that seems more like a personal trapping than something that all the other werewolves would go along with. If The Commander (I had to actually consult the fandom wiki to get the name right; I didn’t write it down once!) had some silly reason for hating dogs and wanting to make wigs out of them, that would have been a bit of a groan-inducer, but it would have moved the plot along. Maybe she is a cat person. Maybe she had a bad experience with a dog. Maybe a dog bit some of her hair off and that’s her way of getting back at them! I don’t know. But this whole thing with werewolves hating dogs didn’t feel right to me at all. And as far as I can tell, and remember, it was never explained beyond “dog, ew”.
So overall, I give 100% Wolf a 7/10 or 3.5/5. The story was well written, with a great and clever mix of suspense and comedy. I didn’t find it to be nearly as “recycled” as many of my peer reviewers, genuinely. It was enjoyable, and I would watch it again… but only if I could fast-forward over the peeing scene.
200% Wolf: An Actual 100% Improvement
Yeah, 200% Wolf deserved the 100% increase. The visuals are gorgeous, and the story is really well done, even better than the last one. All of the characters felt believable, which probably shouldn’t be a high bar to clear, but I’ve seen a lot of junk in the past two years.
Moopoo, despite his awkward name, is actually a really adorable character. He is the right amount of chaotic and vulnerable to be a great representation of what one thinks of when you hear “child spirit”. Minor criticism: I knew from the first act when he tried to “drink in” Freddy’s energy that he was going to have to give up being a wolf to save Moopoo in the end; they could have cut that bit out and it would have been significantly more surprising (and probably hit harder).
I also loved the bit where Freddy was protective of Moopoo when they slept. It was a very small scene but it made their relationship so much stronger in my view. I love little touches like this. And it really showed Freddy to be growing into an exemplary wolf/poodle.
Max was so well-done as a villain. You really wanted to believe she could be turned around, and when she sells them out, it is so cathartic to watch her become a whoops herself. Speaking of the whoopses, I really liked the bat character. I could tell he was trying to be friendly with Batty. I do somewhat wonder if he is the fusion of a dog with a bat based on how he acted.
I feel like I connected more emotionally to the first film. I’ve been Freddy. I’ve been Batty, even. But there is no denying that this second film is much better in every possible way. The story was much more original, and the animation and visual effects were improved. This film could stand on its own without being a sequel. You don’t need to watch the first one to watch this one, and you could still get pretty much everything out of it. It’s rare to see a sequel done so well.
Oh, I’m forgetting that we had to have an extended, way-too-long fart joke. At least it’s not the peeing scene from the last one. Still, why the unnecessary lingering on bodily function humour? You were so close to having the coveted 5/5.
Overall, this was still an astonishingly good film, and the first time in a long time I’m reaching into the 4.5/5 category. You’re a rounding error away from Balto, Freddy! You’ve done well!
- e621, often shortened “e6”, is the name of a furry art site. It contains a lot of, shall we say, explicit art as well. For most of its existence, any art containing a character that is underage was tagged “cub”, no matter what animal it was. Even human children were tagged “cub”! This irritated animals like me, who work in metadata all day, and they eventually replaced it with “young”. ↩︎