Movie Review: Madea's Tough Love

Last year when I learned that Tyler Perry was creating an animated feature length movie, I was excited. You may ask "why?" but why not?! This is the diversity we've been asking for. I know many people enjoy his movies but many others have a love/hate relationship with his work as well. The animated movie is pretty much an exact cartoon version of his movies so for those of you that fall in the love/hate category you may want to skip this one.

The story starts off with two neighborhood kids who are idly hanging around while an old lady attempts to cross the street. Madea sees that the woman is struggling and takes it upon herself to confront the kids and teach them about manners. These kids aren't interested and get fresh with Madea thus causing her to lose her cool. Ultimately a chase around town ensues between Madea and the kids. By the end, the police arrest Madea for property damage, disturbing the peace and more. The judge then sentences her to community service at the local broke down community center. There she is confronted by the two kids from earlier and some other typical misunderstood bad kids from the area.

Of course there is an antagonist, a woman running for mayor that happens to have her own motives about how she will "help" the city. The movie continues very predictably to conclude with Madea and the kids defeating the evil woman's plans.

I was disappointed with the overall development of the characters. It was all predictable. The visual style was very reminiscent of The Proud Family/ Recess and Fat Albert in a way, yet the Madea and other characters from Tyler Perry's live action movies were more like caricatures.

Final feelings... It is difficult wanting diverse content creators and equal representation of characters in animation and then getting a project that supports these things goes and drops the ball. I am not knocking the people, the artists and writers for their hard work and contributions but I want people who go forward making animated content to really cherish the medium for what it is.

Watch the trailer below and let me know what you think