By Justin Kroll
For The State News

Every so often, Hollywood will release two or three films with similar ideas or themes within a year's span.

One year, there was the comet-coming-to-destroy-Earth movie ("Deep Impact" and "Armageddon"), and another year it was the adventure-on-Mars film ( "Mission to Mars" and "Red Planet").

Some of the films were hits and some were flops, but none of them were duplicates of the other film. They did not share similar scripts, characters or even plots or story lines. The only thing they had in common was a theme or idea.

With Disney's new computer-animated film, "The Wild," not only do the characters and setting sound familiar, but the plot feels like a copy of a film that was just released.

"The Wild" is set in a New York City zoo where its main attraction is Samson (voiced by Kiefer Sutherland), the fierce and wild lion and his cub Ryan (voiced by Greg Cipes). Father and son are having problems because Ryan has yet to develop his roar and Samson is pressuring him to move along faster.

The rest of Samson's group of friends includes a squirrel who is in love with a giraffe, a dim-witted anaconda and the film's brightest spot, Nigel the Koala, voiced by the very talented and funny Eddie Izzard.

The action begins when Ryan is accidentally taken from the zoo in a cargo container and Samson and his friends escape from the zoo to find him. After running into a group of rabid dogs and friendly crocodiles throughout New York City, they finally find Ryan's container, only to see it placed on a ship and sailed off.

The animals end up stealing a small sailboat and following the ship all the way to its destination in Africa.

Once Ryan is let loose in the jungles of Africa, the group of friends is not only trying to find him, but fends off a group of wildebeests.

There are a couple twists thrown in the mix that really aren't very surprising, and there's the occasional joke to keep the audience mildly entertained. Other than that, the movie is never really able to establish itself as an entertaining film.

After learning about the story and plot elements, doesn't this film sound a lot like the Dreamworks picture "Madagascar," which came out last summer?

A group of animals led by a lion escape from a New York zoo to find a friend, only to be captured and shipped off — these two plots are near duplicates.

Of course, in this new version, there are a couple of changes, such as the idea that the animals could actually steal a boat, figure out how to drive and navigate it, and are then able to follow a ship all the way across the ocean to its destination.

Other than these small plot deviations, this film is practically a remake of "Madagascar." The worst part is that "Madagascar" was not even that good to begin with. It was too short, uneventful and pretty boring, and "The Wild" takes on all of these aspects as well.

Sequels and remakes are great, and with summer approaching, that is what everyone is looking forward to. But when a film is released that labels itself as neither a remake nor a sequel and has a familiar story line, you are only cheating the viewers by giving them a copycat of something they have already seen.