Who knows; maybe there has been a clamour out there for a follow up to the 2017 animation The Jungle Bunch? I have to confess I couldn’t remember if I’d seen it when I sat down in front of this sequel: then a penguin waddled on to the screen painted with tiger stripes, and the memories clawed their way back in. The original was a relentlessly wacky nonsensical adventure about a gang of animal chums saving their forest from a pyromaniacal koala. The kind of targeted-at-under-fives mayhem that Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda pulled off better.
This frenetic sequel gives out more of the same. This time around, Maurice the penguin and his pals are up against a villainous beaver (if you haven’t seen the original, Maurice is painted with orange stripes because he’s an orphan and was raised by a tiger). The beaver’s diabolical plan is to destroy the jungle with a toxic purple foam, for reasons never explained. Maurice and his crime-fighting critters need to concoct an antidote – which involves stealing a rare ingredient from a creepy cult called the Sacred Circle of Stink.
