Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2021)

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a 2021 computer-animated comedy film based on the Diary of a Wimpy Kid book series by Jeff Kinney. This movie serves as the official reboot of the series after Disney acquired Fox. It was released on Disney+ on December 3, 2021.

Plot
Greg Heffley dreams of becoming famous while surviving middle school with his best friend, Rowley.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The biggest problem with the movie is that it acts like since the viewers already read the books, it doesn't have to try and surprise you with anything and just simply show you them without building them up. Not to mention, the beginning of the movie just explains everything to you instead of showing it such as Rodrick explaining about the cheese touch to Greg, whereas the book and live-action movie had Rodrick not bringing up the cheese and leaving it as a surprise.
 * 2) While faithful, the movie is basically just a shot for shot adaptation of the first book with nothing really new being added to the parts that were adapted from the book which makes it so predictable, and it doesn't really put much effort in making you invested in anything like the live action movies did. In fact, the only real difference from the book is a scene of Rodrick telling Greg about the cheese. Every other scene that's present from the book is pretty much the exact same thing, which almost makes the movie not worth watching in the first place.
 * 3) The film's running time is 58 minutes long, which is far too short for the book to squeeze all of its content into it, which ends up making the film feel very rushed. This leads to many scenes such as The Wizard of Oz play (although it was mentioned), Rodrick getting in trouble for Manny bringing one of his magazines to school, and even the Safety Patrol plot (The turning point in Greg and Rowlye's relationship and the reason why they stopped being friends in the first place), getting cut out entirely of the film.
 * 4) The movie's animation, while very faithful to Kinney's art style, does not translate well at all to 3D animation. Some of the character designs look very uncanny when put into a 3D space, with Manny and Fregly being good examples of this. It also doesn't help that early concepts for the movie showed that the movie was going to be like The Peanuts Movie where it would be CG, but the characters would be displayed on a 2D vector instead of a 3D vector.
 * 5) With the exception of Greg's mom, Manny, and Fregley, none of the other minor characters are really given that much screen time to make much of an impression in this movie as they did in the live-action movies, which makes their scenes look very forgettable.
 * 6) * This is especially true for Rodrick, who had a larger minor role in the first book, but only appears in this movie for a very short amount of time.
 * 7) The comedy is very dull as their are not that many jokes in it, and the jokes that are present are very basic.

Good Qualities

 * 1) The voice acting is good, particularly Greg's voice actor.
 * 2) Stays faithful to the source material since it is written by Jeff Kinney, the author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
 * 3) At the very least, almost everyone else, like Greg Heffley himself, is likable and retains their likable charm from the original book.
 * 4) The score is decent.
 * 5) The animation, while uncanny and not well-translated, is somewhat decent and cute to some people.

Reception
On review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an average critical approval rating of 64% based on 11 reviews, while having a audience score of 45% based over 50 reviews. On Metacritic, it has an average score of 50%, indicating mixed or average reviews.

Trivia

 * The film was originally in-development at 20th Century Animation, but was changed to a Walt Disney Pictures release before completion. Additionally, while Walt Disney Pictures or 20th Century Animation nor 20th Century Studios is never explicitly mentioned in the credits, the Walt Disney Pictures castle opening appears in the beginning of the film.