10 Worst Movie CGI Of 2020
3. The Mice - The Witches
As much as Robert Zemeckis has been a visual effects pioneer for his entire career, it's also fair to say that his output continually proves infuriatingly hit-and-miss.
His re-adaptation of Roald Dahl's classic novel The Witches wasn't really something anyone was asking for, yet even if you can accept the film as a mediocre slice of forgettable family fare, it's tough to forgive the wonky CGI.
This proves especially grating when depicting the film's young heroes once they're transformed into mice: the rodent models look no better than what you'd expect to see in a turn-of-the-millennium film like Stuart Little.
Zemeckis, who has dragged his own films kicking and screaming into the uncanny valley far too many times, never reconciles the necessary human expressiveness with a plausible animal aspect, ensuring the mice look totally lousy throughout.
It doesn't help at all that Nicolas Roeg's 1990 adaptation pulled off the mice far more convincingly through practical animatronics which still hold up extremely well 30 years later.
In Zemeckis' film, the mice ultimately proved emblematic of its overall failing - it was a hollow, soulless facsimile of a timeless classic nobody needed to be remade.