The Nut Job (2014)

The Nut Job arrives from 2014 bearing a 1959 setting, a nut heist, and a purple squirrel named Surly who begins as an unrepentant thief and ends as a marginally less unrepentant thief. That is the arc. The film, loosely expanded from a 2005 short called Surly Squirrel, concerns a park community hoarding food for winter under a raccoon who turns out to be a tyrant, a nut shop that fronts for a bank robbery, and a pug named Precious who is menaced with a dog whistle. It is a caper picture with fur, and the machinery of the genre grinds along to predictable effect.

What it does not do is instruct. There is no lesson about the climate, no critique of the wealthy, no meditation on identity, no character built as a vessel for a cause. Raccoon is a villain because he is greedy, not because he stands for structural inequality. Andie is a red squirrel who becomes a love interest, and the film makes no argument about her place in any patriarchy. A mute rat named Buddy exists, and his silence is a running gag, not representation. The 1959 period dressing is nostalgia and homage to mid-century animation, not a historical thesis. Nobody here is trying to teach us anything, which is either a relief or a vacuum, depending on the viewer.

Critics at the time were unkind and the box office was not, which tells us what it always tells us. A sequel followed. The film sits in the record as a minor animated heist comedy with a sour protagonist and a fondness for flatulence. There is no social program, no sermon, no moment where the audience is asked to examine its conscience. On the scale of contemporary cultural consciousness, this is a clean zero, and there is something restful about that. The squirrel simply wants the nuts.