Like the toys of Toy Story before them, the farm animals of Barnyard stand up on their own two legs and lead busy lives when no one's looking. The ruse works so well, the farmer believes his herd consists entirely of normal male cows with udders. Wait ... male cows!? With udders!? That's right—the main characters of Barnyard are all hermaphroditic anomalies.
Apparently, after frying his brain in the course of making far, far too many films about thumbs, writer/director Steve Oedekerk has forgotten that male cows are bulls. If you can ignore the distracting, anatomically incorrect udders (which isn't easy, since all these cow-boys walk erect), then you're free to lose yourself in the hokey plot.
Irresponsible Otis (voiced by Kevin James), the standard black-and-white man-cow, just wants to be a party animal, despite the moaning and mooing of his disapproving dad, Ben (Sam Elliott). It'll take Ben's death, at the claws of a pack of coyotes, to inspire Otis to change his ways. And inspiring that death will be, since dead animals on this particular farm get a tombstone and a funeral rather than a trip to the Sunday barbecue.
There are moments in Barnyard that work. When the farmer stumbles upon his walking, talking livestock at one point, he receives a hilarious amount of punishment as the animals struggle to make it all seem like a dream. And an extended sequence with the cattle exacting revenge on a preadolescent cow-tipper even recalls some of the best adventures of Gary Larson's Far Side cows.
But for every joke that works, three fall flat or don't make sense. A late-night barn party seems threatened by the arrival of the police, but it turns out the siren and flashing red light belong to a pizza-delivery truck. What the hell kind of pizza-delivery truck has a siren and flashing red light? Later, a group of cows drinks milk as though it were beer. Would milk be the barnyard equivalent of booze? Wouldn't it be as gross as four guys drinking breast milk? Or do these four bovine guys not mind breast milk because they have breasts of their own (which leads back to that original udder query)?
These are not the kinds of questions I want to be asking —or, worse, trying to answer—after a kids' movie.