58 min | PG | December 3, 2021 | Walt Disney Pictures
Greg Heffley starts middle school convinced it is a battlefield for social rank. He keeps a record of his climb in a journal he swears is not a diary. The animation finally looks like the books. The kid at the center is still a little jerk.
Greg Heffley starts middle school and treats the building as a war for social rank. He narrates his survival plan in a journal he insists is not a diary. The film is really about a kid who treats friendship as a liability and other children as obstacles to climb past. Jeff Kinney’s source novel runs on one honest idea. Greg is the hero of his own story and a coward in everyone else’s. This animated version of “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” keeps that premise and renders it in CG built to copy Kinney’s stick-figure drawings.
Brady Noon voices Greg with the flat confidence of a kid who never doubts his own scheming. He delivers self-serving narration without a flicker of guilt, which is the whole point of the character. Ethan William Childress voices Rowley Jefferson as the one genuinely decent kid in the cast. Childress gives Rowley a sincerity that exposes how casually Greg uses him. Hunter Dillon plays older brother Rodrick as pure adolescent menace, and Erica Cerra and Chris Diamantopoulos voice parents Susan and Frank as adults who never once catch what Greg is doing. Christian Convery voices the unsettling neighbor Fregley and commits all the way to the weirdness.
Director Swinton O. Scott III builds the film as a chain of short vignettes pulled straight from the book. The episodes sit next to each other and rarely connect into momentum. Jeff Kinney writes the script himself and protects his own jokes. The animation is the real accomplishment here. The CG models reproduce the flat, round-headed cartoons of Kinney’s pen drawings and keep their thick black outlines and limited palette. The look finally matches how readers already picture these characters in their heads.
The film knows exactly what it is. It is a clean transfer of a popular book to the screen with no ambition past that. The visual style does its job and the voice cast hits the right register. The story underneath stays slight, and the stop-start structure never finds a gear. Greg learns almost nothing, and the film is honest enough not to pretend otherwise. It delivers the book and stops there.