The 15 Most Obnoxious Movie Animals

Someday, the animal kingdom is going to revolt and beat every human in sight over the head with DVD cases. Honestly, we’re surprised it hasn’t happened already. For decades, filmmakers have made it common practice to turn the world’s innocent creatures, both big and small, into unbearable and degrading centerpieces for kid’s cinema.

This Friday, bunny rabbits across the land will hold their collective breath in anticipation of Hop’s critical reception. Just in time for the pre-Easter rush, Hop follows the shenanigans of E.B., a teenage bunny that dreams of becoming a rock star but is in line to take over the Easter Bunny mantle. As much as we like Russell Brand, who voices the rambunctious hare, we’re not ready to consult Fandango just yet. Call us unfair skeptics, but a movie about a talkative bunny with Brand’s diction and an inclination to bash his drumsticks on any hard surface sounds more like a prison sentence than a fun night out.

Even if we’re proven wrong and Hop is in the same league of badass movie animals as Rango, it won’t make us forget about past films that gave us similar feelings of apprehension only to fulfill the negativity tenfold. For E.B.’s sake, hopefully the bunny doesn’t piss us off as much as the inclusions on the following list of the 15 Most Obnoxious Movie Animals. Don’t let your pets read this, though; this could trigger a revolt sooner than we’d ever imagined.

If you were to tell us that we’d hate a movie starring Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi, and Jon Favreau as colleagues prior to seeing G-Force, we’d have snickered in disgust. But not even a cast of such talented voice actors could salvage this children’s movie stricken with screenwriter diarrhea.



The fact that Jerry Bruckheimer—Hollywood’s top purveyor of pricey blockbusters with minimal substance—is behind G-Force says it all. It’s nothing more than a hodgepodge of cluttered action and unfunny wisecracking heroes, though instead of Nicolas Cage in flesh-and-blood G-Force has Cage voicing a star-nosed mole named Speckles. At least we’re spared another cringe-worthy Nic Cage hairdo.

To view the Rabbit of Caerbannog as “obnoxious,” one must put his or herself in the shoes of Monty Python’s King Arthur’s court. For anyone who watches the film with a sense of humor and/or a heartbeat, the British comedy troupe’s send-up of Medieval lore is altogether brilliant and never obnoxious.



In the story’s context, the rabbit isn’t just intolerable—it’s unstoppably homicidal. Step anywhere near it and the cute little slayer will fly up to your neck and somehow bite your head off, and that can get old real fast. Sounds more deadly than bothersome? You try walking around with soiled armor.

A dog wearing a little hoodie—adorable, especially if accompanied by a leggy and voluptuous owner. A dog clad in a little cape and does nothing but fly fast and scream obnoxiously, however, should be neutered, just like the script of the painfully one-note kiddie mess Underdog.



Underdog is the Kevin James of the canine community. Whereas James resorts to pratfalls and crotch-shots for laughs, the super-powered beagle flies into things and whizzes past folks’ heads with a “How wacky am I?” attitude. “Wack” is more like it. It’s really not hard to make people chuckle at physical comedy, but somehow Underdog fails, though not for lack of effort. Little kids would even say, “Step your game up, pooch.”

Chris Rock going joke-for-joke with a still-funny Eddie Murphy sounds like great idea, no? We thought so, too, until we realized that, in Dr. Dolittle, Rock was actually a fat and galling guinea pig named Rodney, and Murphy’s Dolittle was a nice guy pushover. Suddenly, we feared the worst.



And that’s nearly what we got in Dr. Dolittle, a decent kid’s comedy that points out how exasperating Rock’s voice can be when you can’t actually see the guy’s facial expressions and standup stage presence. Adding to Rodney’s lack of success is the fact that Rock is funniest when the rating rises above G. Made family-friendly, his high-pitched rants come across like a hyperactive pre-teen in need of Ritalin.

The old cartoon TV show was charming, fun, and ripe with snappy humor. In other words, the polar opposite of Hollywood’s 2007 reincarnation of the squeaky-voiced trio.



In the feature film, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore go out of their way to check off every children’s movie cliché known to man. Stupid potty humor involving farts and burps? Yup. Goofy versions of classic songs (i.e., “Funky Town”) that’ll leave adults hating tracks they once dug? Present. Slapstick gags that any six-year-old with a colored pencil and a notepad could’ve dreamt up? But of course.



Compared to Alvin and the Chipmunks the movie, those old cartoons were works of Shakespearean maturity.

Of all the mad villains’ plots in pop culture, Mr. Tinkles’ is one of the most infuriating. A white Persian kitty with Stewie Griffin-like delusions of world supremacy, Tinkles (voiced by Sean Hayes), the main antagonist in the highly unwatchable Cats & Dogs, is devoted to finding a way to make all humans allergic to dogs.



So, yeah, the little pussy bastard wants you to get rid of your best friend, the canine pal who’s always there when your days are lousy or your girlfriend acts all nutty. Mr. Tinkles obviously doesn’t realize that dogs make far greater pets than cats—who needs an animal that’s only nice to you when it wants to eat? We’ll have to deal with that once we have kid. Give us face-licking Fido any day of the week.

Didn’t 1985’s “The Super Bowl Shuffle” teach us anything? Besides showing sports fans that Jim McMahon has zero rhythm, the Chicago Bears’ atrocious rap jam showed that bears should never sing, dance, or play instruments—just look intimidating and rule the field, or woods.



However, McMahon, Walter Payton, and their teammates look like Wu-Tang when compared to the hairy performers in The Country Bears. Not only do their songs reek of cheese, the furry Partridge Family wannabes are as funny as a funeral procession and so obviously walking billboards for the Disney theme parks from which they derived.



The worst thing about the Country Bears, though, is the negative effect they have on performers who usually don’t piss us off: Christopher Walken, on a shameless payday, actually performs a musical number in front of the bears by making fart sounds with his armpits. It’s uncomfortably weird, which normally works for Mr. Walken. Screw you, bears.

Bossy, condescending, and prone to licking—sounds a lot like some of our ex-girlfriends. Maybe that’s why Francis the Talking Mule rubs us the wrong way. Or perhaps it’s just because the idea of taking orders from something that resembles an ass is just ridiculous.



Over the course of seven movies back in the ’50s, Francis paved the way for Mr. Ed by speaking to only one human (dim-witted Army soldier Peter) whom he routinely clowns. Together, Peter and his annoying animal friend visited a race track, West Point, and a haunted house.



The formula was simple: Peter’s a dumbass who can’t do anything without Francis’ guidance. Think of the mule as Bud Abbott and Peter as Lou Costello, and, if you’re like us, you’ve always wanted to slap the smugness off of Abbott’s face. In Francis’ case, we’d feed him some of Mary Jane’s grass and tell him to lighten up.

First off, let’s cut Monkeybone’s title character a break here: The animated primate isn’t half as insufferable as Brendan Fraser in the colossally excruciating film that signaled the beginning of the end for Fraser’s credibility.



But that’s about as much slack as a piece of floss. Fraser is just awful in this flop of a “stop motion meets live action” comedy, so you’d hope that the film’s computer-generated misfit would generate at least a few laughs. Instead of making us giggle, though, Monkeybone just drives us up a wall.



John Turturro does his worst Joe Pesci impersonation to give Monkeybone one of the most irksome voices imaginable, and it’s only when MB dives headfirst into co-star Rose McGowan’s cleavage that we don’t want to kick his little simian ass. To want to do so then would be an act of petty jealousy, and we’re better than that.

In hilarious classics like Stripes and Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is at his best when he’s acting in his haughty “I can care less” disposition. Yet, the problem—well, one of many problems—in Garfield: The Movie is that Murray himself doesn’t seem to give a shit. He’s just collecting a quick, easy buck while tarnishing the legacy of one our favorite Saturday morning ’toon characters.



Garfield plays like the movie’s producers thought kids would go nuts for Murray’s dry sense of humor, but then tried coming up with Murray-esque jokes themselves and flashed enough zeros in front of the comedy legend’s face that he didn’t bother to suggest revisions. The result is just a fat animated cat that thinks it’s cooler than it really is, next to Jennifer Love Hewitt struggling to find a pulse in her useless human character.



Why wasn’t Garfield: The Movie made back when people actually gave a shit about the feline? Yes, Murray-as-Garfield eats the scenery like it's Tender Vittles; too bad the box is stale.

If the great John Candy were alive today, we’d love to ask him, “What in fuck’s sake were you thinking making a talking horse movie with Bobcat Goldthwait?” It’s a legitimate question that demands an answer. We can’t imagine the payday was all that grand, and he must’ve read the script at some point before shooting. So what gives?



In the dreadful Hot To Trot, Candy voices Don, a gabby horse in a cheap suit that tries to earn laughs through sexual puns about sperm whales. Equestrian fail. You know it’s bad when Bobcat Goldthwait is the funny one in a John Candy movie. To put it delicately, both Don and Hot To Trot are horseshit.

For those tree-hugging pacifists who feel bad whenever they swat flies, we present Buzz and Scuzz, two of kids’ cinema’s most unlikeable characters of all time. A pair of overly talkative horseflies, the not-so-dynamic duo spend all of their screen time in Racing Stripes basically one-upping each other’s ability to aggravate the hell out of viewers. They’re why fly swatters were invented.



Racing Stripes has the historical blemish of being the film in which the unfortunate comedy team of David Spade (as Scuzz) and Steve Harvey (Buzz) set racial humor back decades. Witness their heinous rendition of the Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder tune “Ebony and Ivory” sung on the back of “Stripes” the zebra. Or how they needlessly insult that innocent zebra with kindergarten-level disses. They should hover over Stripes’ dung, where they belong.

We never knew how much we missed the Taco Bell dog until Disney’s grating Beverly Hills Chihuahua, which is basically Lady And The Cholo.



George Lopez, who’s not even funny as a human, voices Papi, a precocious little pooch who says things like “I’m here to protect you, mi Corazon” to his chica, Chloe (voiced by Drew Barrymore), and can’t do anything without low-rent mariachi music playing in the background. By nature, Chihuahuas are annoying dogs, with their high-pitched yaps and Napoleon complex; degrading one of them with Lopez’s flat humor and a cast of people (including Piper Perabo and Jamie Lee Curtis) who look about ready to strangle their agents once it’s time to hit the craft service table.



Proving that parents will do anything to get their kids out of the house, Beverly Hills Chihuahua spent two weeks atop the box office in October 2008. Apparently Disney execs felt guilty after that—Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2 went straight to DVD last month. Mucho frio!

Movies that resort to grandiose choreography, as a rule, suck the big one. But a movie that stages a dance party with choppily animated dogs? Call the pound. Based off its trailer, the prognosis was already clear for Marmaduke: Someone needed to put the irritating Great Dane down stat. They didn’t, unfortunately, and the critics all responded with animal cruelty.



It’s not like ’Duke ever had a chance. The film’s producers must’ve thought it was 2005 when they cast Owen Wilson to voice the big dog; trying his usual “aloofly charming slacker” routine in canine form, the once-funnyman can’t even save face while speaking through a Great Dane’s mug. Speaking of which, the cheap-o talking mouth effects splattered on Marmaduke’s grill are more nightmarish than cute—the damn thing looks like it has marbles in its gums when it speaks.



When Scooby Doo was asked to give his take on Marmaduke, pop culture’s Great Dane of choice said, “And I thought I caught a bad break working with Matthew Lillard.”

Frankly, if not for this countdown, we’d have totally forgotten that this movie even exists. Something tells us Jerry O’Connell and MTV executives would prefer that frame of mind.


Starting out as a moronic yet harmless MTV short, Joe’s Apartment was foolishly stretched out into an 80-minute feature because…well, we’re not quite sure. It’s not like Toys ‘R’ Us was clamoring for singing and dancing toy cockroaches. Biting the California Raisins’ style, the army of roaches inside Joe’s (O’Connell) pad make up for their minute size with ostentatious musical numbers; unlike the smooth-talking Raisins, though, the bugs also love to cockblock Joe and frequently disrupt his personal space.



In our version, Joe would hit up the nearest BJ’s Wholesale Club, stock up on Raid, and decimate the roach population all in the movie’s first ten minutes. And then he’d invite the Cali Raisins over to sing Bone Thugs ‘N’ Harmony’s “Tha Crossroads” as Joe swept the roach carcasses into a trash can. You could sell a movie trailer off of that image alone.