What Happens When The Directors Of ‘Foodfight!’ And ‘Beauty And The Beast’ Make A Film Together? ‘Bobbleheads: The Movie’

The year 2020 has finally gotten the animated film it deserves. Universal Pictures Home Entertainment released a trailer today for Bobbleheads: The Movie, a home entertainment release that is inspired by those figurines that have wobbly heads.

In the film, a trio of bobbleheads have to team up against grotesque caricatures of lower-income white Americans, who are described as “trashy humans” in the official synopsis, but then the musician Cher (in bobblehead form) steps in to help the bobbleheads:

Get ready for a big shake-up when misfit bobbleheads take on trashy humans and a slobbery dog who crash their home with plans to swap a new baseball player bobblehead for a valuable one of them. With some guidance from Bobblehead Cher, they find the courage to bobble-up for an outrageous battle of wits and wobble.

More bizarre than the film’s premise is the talent involved. It’s directed by former Disney director Kirk Wise, who co-directed the Academy Award Best Picture-nominated film Beauty and the Beast as well as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Atlantis: The Lost Empire, while it’s produced by Lawrence Kasanoff, who directed the notorious trainwreck Foodfight!

Another oddity: the trailer prominently features Microsoft on its studio title card. Apparently, it’s because the film was produced in partnership with Microsoft’s Azure Cloud service. Nvidia provided the GPU hardware, and also merits a mention in the press release. It’s not clear what studios made the film, but we’re told that crews in Los Angeles, Nepal, Mumbai, and Kolkata worked on it.

Universal’s 1440 Entertainment production arm is presenting the film, which was produced by Kasanoff’s Threshold Entertainment. The voice cast features Jennifer Coolidge, Luke Wilson, Khary Peyton, Brenda Song, Karen Fukuhara, Julian Sands, and Cher.

Bobbleheads: The Movie will premier exclusively on digital, dvd, and on-demand on December 8, 2020. Netflix has picked up streaming rights.