Emotions instead of reason Filming sequels many years ago became a tradition, to which the release of bonus shorts was later added. This is common practice in cases where the balances of the budget still allow you to remove something. "Prazzle" until it received a full-length sequel, then at the same time it came out short and not too successful "First date Riley."
The whole film is made of clichés, and, quite mediocre. Honestly, the originality, or rather its absence, suffers and the puzzle itself, because the characters, their actions and conflicts we have seen many times before and later. But since "The First Date" was still required to fit in four minutes, the concentration of secondaryness reaches even more outstanding proportions. Dating children and the reaction of parents to it have always been uncomfortable themes in American cinema. By showing all sorts of awkward attempts to find common ground between people of different generations, the directors do not completely ridicule this, do not completely condemn and at the same time do not encourage anything. Just having children and needlessly worried parents, let’s laugh at how absurd their interaction from the outside looks.
The strongest desire to slap yourself on the head due to the strangeness of what is happening causes slang, the correct presentation of which for some reason is not possible for many directors. There is, of course, an element of self-criticism in the form of the emotion of Anger, who is rightly dissatisfied with the illogical and far from common sense behavior of Riley’s parents, but at least the cartoon does not dispense with obvious quarrels of characters that would look like some scandal in a television talk show. That’s exactly what you want to see in movies, right? No.
And let's look at how the director visualizes the emotions in the head of a teenage boy. They can be described in three words: complete absence of a brain. It seems that in creating a cartoon about emotions, the scriptwriters forgot something more important - some mind or brain, whatever you want to call it. Emotions, of course, help us live and give the surrounding space bright colors, but at certain moments they interfere with the adequate perception of ordinary situations. In this case, a date. I’m not saying that the problem of understanding different generations is far-fetched, but when the cartoon openly shows that children understand life better than parents, this is not always and not quite correct. To put it mildly.
“First Date” leaves relatively good impressions only with the finale, where good music sounds and at least some of the false ideas of parents dispel as if the smoke from the head of Anger, but the very idea of the cartoon and its implementation are one big drawback.
3 out of 10