Hey Arnold: The Jungle Movie (2017)

Plot: Arnold and Gerald plan to make a humanitarian video during the summer, an attempt to win a trip with their classmates to San Lorenzo, where Arnold's parents were last seen nine years ago. Their plan backfires, but when Helga discovers Arnold's real reasons to go to San Lorenzo, she makes a humanitarian video of her own of all the things Arnold has done for other throughout the show and their class wins the trip. When they arrive, Arnold tries to find his parents' good friend, Eduardo, but discovers that there might be more behind what happened to his parents than he is aware as it turns out an evil mercenary named La Sombra is after Arnold because he's the key to something his parents were working on that La Sombra wants for himself.

To say that this movie even exists is a miracle for any Hey Arnold! fan to behold would be an understatement. Since before Hey Arnold!: The Movie came out, the creator of the show, Craig Bartlett started writing the original script for Hey Arnold: The Jungle Movie, making it the official sequel to tie up loose ends with the show, namely with finding out where is Arnold's missing parents and whether or not we will see him and Helga get together. Unfortunately, due to Hey Arnold: The Movie rightfully bombing for being (in my opinion) the bland, unenergetic and rushed piece of crap that it is, The Jungle Movie was never greenlit, and so with the end of season 5 fans were left unsatisfied for the way things ended with one of Nickelodeon's best shows. Thus for the past 15 years, people have been dying to find out what happens in The Jungle Movie even to the point of Craig Bartlett considering turning it into a comic book so that fans can at least learn what happens that way, and people created petitions trying to save the movie. Finally, Nickelodeon made the announcement a year ago that they are finally making the film and fans were ecstatic that their long-lost childhood dream was about to finally come true. The movie aired on November 24th 2017, and having just seen the last night what do I think of it? Well, while I am not even a fifth of the Hey Arnold! fan that this is intended for, this film is a million bazillion quadrillion times better than Hey Arnold: The Movie and is definitely the satisfying series final/potential intro to a possible season 6 that even I wanted to see as someone who only went through the show on Netflix a few years ago. 

The first 20 minutes of this movie alone has so much more heart than the previous film. Honestly, it's like an extra episode of the show, and I mean that in the best way. You have Arnold trying to figure out something that involves him helping other people, you have Helga stalking him, and when we see the video that Helga, Gerald, Pheobe and the rest of the kids made in order to win the trip to San Lorenzo, we see a lot of familiar characters and lookbacks on past stories from the show that is touching to see. It's like the first third of the movie was practically designed to ensure the audience that it has much more thought and focus on the source material compared to the last movie where it practically rushed into the conflict without even introducing the main and supporting characters to both fans and moviegoers who haven't seen the show. To say the very least, it's a heartwarming little segment before we go to the meat of the story.

The characters are displayed a lot better than they were in the first movie. While not every single character has a special amount of time to shine as some fans probably feel like they should, I think most people agree that there still is a very serviceable amount that will give people the right amount of nostalgia for each character. Whether it's main characters like Arnold, Helga, Phoebe, Gerald, or supporting characters like Harold, Brainy or Rhonda, they all have a moment to shine in some form or another. Even though some characters like Arnold and Oscar now have new voice actors for the movie, the voice actors give the characters the right amount of familiarity that you can barely notice the difference. 

The story is probably what most people have come to expect it to be if you've been anticipating this movie for so long. Whether you've seen the trailers or you're familiar with what they've been trying to do with this movie for 15 long years, you probably have a good idea of what's going to happen throughout most of the film. But thankfully, the film is not without its few surprises and changes to what you might expect. For example, I as a fan of Helga was pleasantly surprised to see how they made her a little more determined to try to listen and understand what Arnold is going through. It isn't just her struggling with her feelings and pretending to be mean every single time she's anywhere near him, she's literally trying to grow to show that she's a real caring person underneath her rude demeanor. (On a side note, it's both creepy yet freaking hilarious how she has her own "Arnold signal" and a secret lair under her Arnold shine.) Even the villain, La Sombra was a little more interesting than I thought he would be. Don't get me wrong, his motivation and evil plan are pretty recycled, but he had one maybe two funny moments and gave the movie a little more edge then you would expect including committing deeds like using his henchmen as bait for booby traps resulting in their deaths And think about i,t, we're talking about a Hey Arnold! movie where people are legitimately dying. Was anybody who was begging for this movie to finally come expecting to see so many characters die because of the main villain? I mean granted, only less than a dozen people died so the body count isn't as gruesome as something like The Transformers: The Movie, but still, for something like Hey Arnold!, this gave The Jungle Movie a somewhat darker edge. It's a little messed up, but at the same time, it's kind of nice that they gave us something like that, not unlike the Storm King's last scene in My Little Pony: The Movie. At the very least, it makes La Sombra a much more interesting Hey Arnold! villain then some big corporate guy in the last film.

The climax in the movie might be the most interesting part for me personally. Even though you have a pretty sharp idea of what it's going to happen, it still had some nice twists and turns to get to the two big things that people have been dying to see. It isn't spoon-fed to you what exactly happens, it resolves the matters of Arnold's parents and his relationship with Helga in a way that's somewhat different than what you might expect yet at the same time give us generally fitting conclusions.

If I had any major problem with the movie it would have to be that a lot of fit feels very rushed, which is apparently a very common complaint among fans. Even if you take out how not every beloved character gets their proper time to shine, there are some scenes containing certain details that don't feel like they were given the proper time they should have been given. Like it's unclear how Arnold has been chosen to do this special deed, we never find out what happens to Big Bob's Beepers outside of the fact that it's losing business, and a huge chunk of the cast is almost never seen again during the last 23 mintues. We see Arnold's grandparents and Helga and Olga's parents help the rest of the class escape La Sombra's camp, but then we never see Helga's family again and we never see Arnold, Helga, and Gerald's friends again until literally during the last 20 seconds of the movie before it cuts to the credits. Most of this, however, is because of time restraints. According to Craig Bartlett, they wrote about twice as much material as there is in the film, but because they could only show so much in an hour and a half plus commercials, a lot of scenes and extra details were cut. So everyone now is hoping that when the film comes out on DVD and blue-ray, there will be a director's cut where we will see much more.

And that's my review for Hey Arnold: The Jungle Movie. The villain is not someone particularly special and it does have some serious pacing problems with the story because of time restraints, but when it's all said and done this is still a very heartwarming, fun and exciting possible conclusion to the Hey Arnold! series that people have been eager to see for so long. If you've never seen the show, you probably won't understand enough to enjoy what's good about it much like with My Little Pony: The Movie, but for many loyal fans of the show, November 24th, 2017 will be a day long remembered where a piece of their childhood finally began to rest in peace. Buy it on YouTube or Google Play if you're eager to see it now or wait until it's out on DVD and Blu-ray and give it a rent and see for yourself. 

Rating: 75%