Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos puts its eggs in the wrong basket

On Sept. 4, Guadalajara-based Huevocartoon Producciones broke new ground. Its new release, the all-Spanish language Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos, became the first Mexican animated feature film ever to be distributed in the United States by a major studio. Made for only $5.3 million, the film rivals Pixar’s industry-leading computer graphics, but thanks to its racy dialogue, Un Gallo is not for young children.

The plot is straightforward: An evil rancher tricks an old lady into betting her farm on a cockfight. Toto (voiced by Bruno Bichir), a scrawny rooster who can’t even muster a decent morning crow, is the farm’s only hope. With just two weeks before the fight, Toto and his friends—chickens, eggs (who bear a strong resemblance to the talking M&Ms characters), and a slice of bacon—search for a certain duck who can train Toto in methods that will help him defeat the Goliath-sized champion rooster, Bankivoide.

Gabriel and Rodolfo Riva Palacio marshaled a 500-member team to craft Un Gallo, the third film in a trilogy popular in Mexico. But it’s not clear they know their American audience: Un Gallo imports a PG-13 rating (for sexual references and suggestive content) into kids’ movie territory. Behind the baby-faced barnyard beaks squawk some dirty birds, although most of the English-subtitled sexual references will go over the heads of 10-year-olds. (And some idiomatic ribaldry might have slipped past my grammar-level grasp of Spanish.) Even the film’s official English title, “Little Rooster’s Egg-cellent Adventure,” conceals innuendo familiar to Spanish speakers—an anatomical metaphor for courage—nested in the title’s literal translation, “A Rooster with Many Eggs.”

The film does deliver some genuinely funny bits, like a mariachi rendition of “Gonna Fly Now” from Rocky, and references to The Karate Kid and other movies. But there’s not much else. Fast-paced but forgettable, it seems Un Gallo counts on impressive graphics, “fowl” language, and some risqué imagery to compensate for its featherweight story.

Starting two weeks after its opening date, the film will be shown dubbed into English. But if the Palacio brothers want American families to turn out for their future films, they’ll need to clean up their language.