PIECE BY PIECE

Directing: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Animation: B+

Pharrell Williams really wants you to know how pleased with himself he is that he wants the documentary about him and his music career to be a LEGO movie. Lego Pharrell comments on it multiple times, on camera.

It’s cute. And undeniably entertaining. It’s also a transparent tactic, a way for Williams to put up a wall between him and his viewers, so we never really get to know him. Piece by Piece is little more than a broad overview of his three-decade career in hip hop and pop, touching on all of the key beats, tracks and singles Williams worked on or released. Quite the parade of superstars he’s worked with appears onscreen as LEGO talking heads (Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Busta Rhymes, Timbaland, Jay-Z, and countless more, including Chad Hugo, Williams’s other half in The Neptunes), none of them given enough screen time to offer anything in the way of real insight.

I went to this movie already knowing to expect this. But director and co-writer Morgan Neville really won me over in the first half of the 93-minute runtime, employing clever visual flourishes that can only be possible by animating the stories being told. Some great visual gags get sprinkled into the narrative, some of them LEGO-specific: a young Pharrell watching Star Trek attempts the Vulcan salute, only to discover it’s not possible with his cylindrical LEGO hands. Plenty of other whimsical delights pass across the screen, particularly when talking heads throw out a hypothetical aside, such as E.T. freaking everyone out at the mall.

So, for a good while, I was thinking Piece by Piece was actually much more fun than I had been led to believe. The LEGO animation is very colorful and imaginative, making this a singular moviegoing experience, even among documentaries that play with form and genre.

But later, things get genuinely weird, and not necessarily in a good way. Making a big deal out of the fact that Williams’s wife, Helen Lasichanh, is giving her first-ever on-camera interview doesn’t quite mean as much when we only ever see her as a Lego Lady. And when the content turns serious, it’s easy to become ambiguous about the use of LEGO to tell this story. There’s a moment when Pharrell breaks down crying, in gratitude for all the friends and family that stood by him over the years. A LEGO version of Morgan Neville—who gets a surprising lot of screen time—offers him a box of tissue. Seeing this scene play out among LEGO pieces is fundamentally ridiculous and undermines the impact.

And I haven’t even mentioned the LEGO representations of moments of historic import, including the Martin Luther King rally on the National Mall, and even the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. I saw these scenes flash onscreen and thought: okay, this is bonkers. Outside of these visual references, the vast majority of Piece by Piece renders its subjects with the same childlike joy that we’ve seen in nearly all the characters in previous LEGO movies. Their vocal delivery, as sitting interview subjects, indicates their expressions are much more neutral most of the time, and yet their LEGO selves typically speak with some manner of smiles on their faces.

After a while, this stuff creates a unique sort of cognitive dissonance, even more pronounced by the use of this gimmick to create some distance between Pharrell Williams and those who are interested in him. Certainly nothing in Piece by Piece reveals what makes him tick, or even gives much of a sense of who he truly is as a person. The whole exercise feels like an attempt at having his cake and eating it too: he let someone make a movie about him, but he didn’t have to reveal anything genuine about himself. I’d have settled for some insight into how becoming one of the first superstar producers ever to exist really affected him on a deep level, but, no such luck.

In the end, we’ll just have to let Pharrell Williams’s work speak for itself, which it does plenty well with or without Piece by Piece. As I write this, I am listening to the soundtrack, packed with all the biggest hits he produced along with five new tracks, and that is a spectacular experience, highly recommend. This is a man with jaw dropping talent, in a movie animated by people with incredible talent, and the two just don’t much inform each other. At least we get clever gags like “PG Spray” used in the room where Snoop Dogg is interviewed, keeping things family-friendly in a story about a guy your young children don’t likely know or care about.

Clap along if you feel like LEGO’s what you want to do,

Overall: B

THE WILD ROBOT

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Animation: A

If you are partial to unusually beautiful animated features, then look no further than The Wild Robot. It has a subtly unique and warm animation style, and every frame is gorgeous.

I also find myself interested, for the first time, in the 2016 middle grade novel of the same name by Peter Brown. Brown both wrote and illustrated a series of books about this character, and if you look them up, you’ll see that the illustrations are much different from the film adaptation—far simpler, less detail, harder lines, black and white. The visual palate gets quite a transformation via DreamWorks Animation, which makes sense when shifting from the more imaginative medium of novels to the visual medium of film. It works incredibly well.

How closely is the story adapted, I wonder? I might just have to check out these books. The film, directed and co-written by Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon), whose historic penchant for visual style over narrative consistency continues here. To be fair, all of his films are easily compelling to kids, with a delightful undercurrent of slightly bent humor. The Wild Robot, for instance, acknowledges death consistently and in a variety of ways—sometimes sad, sometimes with deliciously dark humor. A wonderful group of supporting characters is a mother possum (Catherine O’Hara) and her rotating litter, who practice playing dead. One of the kids, when taken to task by a sibling for not becoming “dead” fast enough, counters that he’s dying of meningitis. “It takes a while!”

The Wild Robot’s frankness about death is surely a big part of the reason it is rated PG: parents with small children may want to wait to show them this one, which veers a bit into Bambi territory. The story begins with a very clever introduction to Roz the robot (Lupita Nyong’o), who has crashed on an island in transport during a storm. She is clearly programmed to serve humans, but here only encounters animals, and struggles to communicate with them—starting with an adorable family of otters. After a series of harrowing experiences in the forest, Roz crushes a goose’s nest after a fall, leaving the one unharmed egg orphaned. Sanders does have a sensitively artistic eye for how to convey such things: Roz lifts a limp feathery wing from the ground for a brief moment, and we understand what has happened. Within minutes, the egg hatches, and the gosling imprints on the first thing it sees: Roz the robot.

The Wild Robot is a little bit scattered in its depiction of a robot adapting to an unfamiliar environment based on programming. Not that any kids will care: this is where I, the geezer, get pointlessly nitpicky about a cartoon. This, however, is where I would be particularly interested in how similarly the source material treats these ideas. The broader message of this film is personal growth, and becoming something “better than what you are programmed to be.” This makes sense for human characters, of which there are none in this movie (save for a few brief shots of programmers in the place from which the robots come). Using an AI robot as well as wild animals who grow beyond their instincts as metaphors is, by contrast, a little messy. How are all the animals of an island wilderness really going to survive if predator and prey have chosen instead to become friends? What happens to the food chain?

I know, I know: no nine-year-old is going to be asking these questions. Just me! I should stress that I really enjoyed The Wild Robot; it just doesn’t quite match the success of early Pixar films, as some of suggested. Those are movies that work equally well for both child and adult viewers, finding ways to speak to them simultaneously at their separate levels. This is something The Wild Robot, which is incredibly successful as a kids’ movie, does not quite manage. I wouldn’t nitpick about it, except that it does feel a bit like it’s trying to speak to adult viewers as well.

A particularly fascinating element of the story here is its setting, in a future where robots this advanced are possible. It might have made more sense to leave more of Roz’s backstory out of it, keep her origins more of a mystery, and focus on a robot character adapting to the wilderness. But the story briefly takes us off the island, both when the geese leave for migration and when Roz is finally located for retrieval. There are very brief shots that offer some surprisingly global context to the story: twice we see the Golden Gate Bridge from the clouds, amongst the countless migrating geese, the road portion of the bridge submerged in water, whales swimming by above it. In another we see the tops of buildings poking out of the water.

I suppose more light could be shed on this in potential sequels, and admittedly I will be very interested in it. For now, there’s a lot hinted at in The Wild Robot that does not get fully explained, and over time, what starts as a pointed focus on Roz as a robot who can only understand things based on programming evolves into a story of self-actualization. Perhaps this movie is Trojan-horsing a story about the singularity.

In the meantime, we are treated to many delightful details, and wonderful voice work by many great actors (Pedro Pascal as a Fink the fox; Bill Nighy as Longneck the grizzled old goose; Mark Hamill as Thorn the bear; Heartstopper’s Kit Connor as Brightbill the young goose; and more). When Roz wakes up with the rest of the animals who hybernated through the winter, spring now upon them, she is half covered in moss. When the migrating geese stop for rest in a kind of biome city, we see giant machines engaged in automated agriculture. There’s also a bunch of robots of the same model as Roz, though it’s not clear what purpose they serve milling about in fields of corn.

All that matters, really, is that this is a story of both robot and animals who learn how to be friends and support each other. To a degree, the relationship between Roz and Brightbill serves as an allegory for the way parenting never comes with a training manual—something the script could have leaned a bit more into. If nothing else, The Wild Robot elicits a lot of questions, but of the sort that aren’t frustrating so much as creating a desire for learning more: about the characters, about the world. This feels like something that can be expanded on in ways that will engender much interest, with the hope that DreamWorks will eventually do just that. Or I suppose I could just read the books.

Logic is beside the point when a benevolent robot goes wild.

Overall: B+

ROBOT DREAMS

Directing: A
Acting: B
Writing: A
Cinematography: A
Editing: A
Animation: A-

Robot Dreams is an utterly delightful, adorable animated feature without any dialogue and with an undercurrent of melancholy. It’s about friendship, love, and a meditation on the transient nature of relationships. It’s uniquely lush in spite of being almost exclusively set in cityscapes, with dark lines around rounded shapes filled with vividly solid colors that somehow combine to create a visual warmth.

Everything about it invites and envelopes you, even as the story takes unexpected turns. This is a universe filled with anthropomorphized animal characters, packed with endlessly charming visual details. “Dog,” the protagonist, wags his little tail any time something makes him happy or excited. He reads a copy of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary when he crawls into bed at night, making us wonder what a society of animals keeps as pets (which we never do actually see).

I am certain I could watch this movie again and discover many charming details I missed the first time around. One of my favorites is when Dog and Robot take a row boat ride in a lake, amongst many others doing the same. One other boat with two companions contains an elephant and a mouse, the elephant weighing down one end of the boat so heavily that the mouse is pushed high into the air at the other end.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. “Robot” is our other main character, a companion Dog has ordered through the mail via a number provided in a television ad. “Are you alone?” the ad copy onscreen reads, and we have already gleaned that Dog is lonely. This was where I first noticed the penchant for background detail in Robot Dreams, actually: as Dog eats his TV dinner alone in his apartment, we can see through his window and again through the window of an apartment across the street, an affectionate couple (a cow and a giraffe, if I remember right) snuggling on a couch in front of their own TV, feeding each other popcorn.

These are details we, as viewers of the movie, notice first. But then Dog notices, and he longs for something of the same in his own life. Enter Robot, who never exists as a character to provoke any thoughts about robotics or AI or anything particularly science-fiction in tone or theme. He’s more like a platonic mail-order bride, and in the end he doesn’t even have any particular personality defects that might cause tension in Dog and Robot’s relationsip. In the end, it’s more about how things can change even between people who never love each other less, but due to circumstances beyond their control. It’s the unhappy accidents of life itself that get in the way.

Robot Dreams is an unrated film, but if it were to get an MPA rating, logically it would get at least PG—not because of vulgarity or violence, which this film really has none of whatsoever, but just because it could be a bit sad for small children. There’s a moment in Robot’s journey, something that happens to him, that broke my heart. And I’m 48 years old.

Well before that, though, we just watch an extended sequence of scenes with Dog and Robot’s blossoming relationship. They walk to the park, go roller skating, and go to the beach. This goes on long enough that I found myself wondering how and when some kind of conflict will enter the story, as there is no story without one. And this is one of the many great things about Robot Dreams: it checks off the obligatory story beats, but always in unexpected ways. In this instance, Dog and Robot get separated at the beach because neither of them realized Robot would rust if he went swimming. He is rusted frozen on the sand, too heavy for Dog to drag away after they have napped clear through evening, and the door through the fence barrier to the beach not only closes at the end of the day, but until the next spring! Dog is dragged away by a cop for trespassing, given no chance to try and repair and retrieve Robot, who then spends the entire winter under snow and ice, quite literally dreaming of ways he might get reunited with Dog (hence the film’s title).

Dog marks the date he can go back (June 1), but in the meantime is forced to go on with his life. He’s still lonely, he tries to make friends, with varying but never complete success. By the time June 1 actually comes around, circumstances have changed significantly for both of them. I won’t spoil it except to assure that Robot does not stay stuck in the sand forever, and this is actually part of their diverging fates that take Robot Dreams to its surprisingly bittersweet conclusion. It’s not often that a film ends with its characters not unhappy, but perhaps fated with a lifetime of wistful yearning for what could have been.

Through all of it, the story is told almost exclusively in a visual manner, the closest to any dialogue being characters snickering or hollering out, “Hey!” I suppose you could say Robot Dreams thus features “voice acting,” although not in a way that particularly showcases anyone’s talent. The story and the animation are what make this the wonderful movie that it is, along with the soundtrack: the only time we hear actual words being vocalized is in song, tunes played on the soundtrack or from a character playing a cassette tape.

Director and co-writer Pablo Berger sets the story in 1980s New York, a plainly deliberate choice that adds to the nostalgic tone. Everything seen onscreen is a celebration of what we see, right down to the teenage animal punks who flip off Robot as he walks by them (oh wait, I guess that one moment could be seen as a “vulgarity,” even though even that plays with charm). Many shots feature the twin towers of the old World Trade Center in the background, always lovingly rendered, just like everything else we see onscreen. This is a movie that loves New York, and all of the characters in it. It loves Dog and it loves Robot, and it loves all the characters they meet along their respective journeys. It loves the art of storytelling and it loves animation in all its forms, and perhaps most of all, it loves us: the people watching the movie.

Robot and Dog swim in a sea of innovative storytelling devices.

Overall: A

INSIDE OUT 2

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Animation: B+

Here is the most important thing you need to know about Inside Out 2, a very fun movie: absolutely do not rewatch the original Inside Out from 2015 soon before going. The original was such a spectacular film, holding up astoundingly well on rewatch even nearly a decade later, having that film fresh in your mind will only taint your experience of watching the sequel.

There is an inescapable, inherent flaw in revisiting a universe that was so wildly imaginative and inventive. The wildness and inventiveness is already established, so it cannot wow you in the same way. It’s impossible, because you are not visiting any place new. On the contrary, you are simply returning to something familiar, if (in my case, anyway) beloved. It’s a comforting and warm journey, to be sure, but it still suffers from the trappings of even the best of sequels.

To be fair, it is possible to top an original film with a sequel—Pixar did it in 2010 with Toy Story 3, after all. But for that to happen, to overcome the issue of returning to a world that cannot be fully fresh, you have to have an amazing script. In the case of Toy Story, it also improved upon the computer animation technology. That film had both as major advantages, largely because its iconic toy characters were brought to an entirely new environment.

That is a key difference with Inside Out 2, which has neither a better script (because how could you improve on perfection) nor a new environment—we are still visiting the inside of young Riley’s head, the one key difference being that now she is hitting puberty. The headquarters of her brain are demolished by a wrecking crew, and the one truly new element are the new emotions brought in as new characters: Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and by far most significantly, Anxiety (Maya Hawke).

And this is to say: Inside Out 2 definitely still has its clever conceits, such as when the original five emotion characters are banished to the back of Riley’s mind, thus becoming “suppressed emotions” who then have to go on a long journey, both to retrieve Riley’s fragile sense of self, and to bring it back to Headquarters. The primary characters of Joy, Sadness and Anger are still voiced by Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith and Lewis Black respectively, but Fear and Disgust are now voiced by Tony Hale and Liza Lapira. Honestly, the loss of Bill Hader and Mindy Kaling isn’t that big a deal; these are just animated characters, after all, and these voices in particular are not distinctive enough to make the characters seem all that different.

What is different is the pacing, where Inside Out 2 rushes through enough of its plot points and packs in enough new characters that, even though at 96 minutes it’s actually a minute longer than the original, it feels shorter. In the first act of the film, I felt like it wasn’t quite giving us enough space to breathe in the story chugging along—although, to be fair, that’s kind of how it feels to be a young teenager, with changes coming hard and fast and without warning.

Another particularly new element in Inside Out 2, which I have mixed feelings about, is the far greater time sitting in the deep awkwardness that comes with a 13-year-old trying to make new friends while lacking the sophistication to realize she’s hurting the friends she’s leaving behind. Most of the film takes place over a stay at hockey camp, where Riley encounters an older player she worships, and yearns to make the team as a Freshman the next school year. She makes some very bad decisions, mostly at the behest of misguided Anxiety while her initial, core emotions struggle to make their way back out of the back of her mind.

I do love the structure of how all of this plays out, and it should be stressed that, while the first half of the film is both solidly entertaining and a variation on familiar themes, it eventually finds its way into a uniquely profound emotional space. I cried a lot more than I expected to at the end of this movie, not because it was sad (as many Pixar films infamously are) but simply because it was so moving, as we watch Riley become a complex, nuanced person.

And that brings us around to this point: the original Inside Out was thematically inaccessible to very young children, and Inside Out 2 is even more so. Both will likely entertain young children regardless, just because of its colorful and sometimes wacky characters, but the sophistication of the storytelling will only register to adult viewers, and possibly some teenage ones. There’s a gag in this film about a character named Nostalgia, rendered as a sweet old lady, who keeps coming out before any of the other emotions want them to. There may be some unintentional symbolism there in terms of the life of Pixar itself, which has now lasted far beyond its glory days, with a record in the past decade or so that’s far spottier than would have seemed possible in the first 15 years of its history.

What this means is, Inside Out 2 is a high quality film for “late-stage Pixar,” but pales in comparison to the vast heights of its early years. Pixar was far ahead of the curve for ages, the only studio consistently churning out reliably excellent content, but now the rest of the industry has caught up with them, both with writers and with impressive animation. The very existence of this film is an invitation to feel nostalgic for a better time, but it was still an invitation I was happy to accept.

Mind the button that brings a nuclear level of change … in a movie that isn’t that different.

Overall: B+

IF

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C
Animation: B-

I found this movie utterly baffling. A story can be any kind of fantasy it wants to be, but once it establishes the rules of its own universe, it needs to follow them. If does not do that.

Ater having written and directed A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II, John Krasinski has clearly built up a lot of goodwill—arguably too much. With If, he turns his attention away from horror and toward family-fantasy fare, and brings with him the voice talents of every movie star imaginable, from Steve Carell to Louis Gossett Jr. to Phoebe Waller-Bridge to Awkwafina to George Clooney to Bradley Cooper to Matt Damon to Bill Hader to Bill Hader to Richard Jenkins to Christopher Meloni to Matthew Rhys to Sam Rockwell to Maya Rudolph to Amy Schumer to Jon Stewart—and more!—all of them voicing a different, animated “Imaginary Friend” (IF). For some reason, somehow, they are all still hanging around Manhattan after their kid friends have grown up and forgotten about them.

All of these “IFs” might have made for a fun combined cast of characters, were this movie to have as much pep as the trailer clearly aimed to suggest. None of the marketing for this movie suggests how incongruously wistful it is in tone, sometimes downright melancholy, certainly downbeat. There are certainly peppy moments, but virtually all of them were in the trailer. You come to this movie and instead find a story about a 12-year-old girl who is growing up too fast due to the death of her mother.

Lest we miss an opportunity to get even more maudlin, our little-girl hero, Bea (Cailey Fleming), is now worried about her dad—played by writer-director John Krasinski—staying in the hospital for a major surgery. What kind of surgery is never explicitly stated, although the gag of his “broken heart” suggest perhaps heart surgery. Bea has already lost one parent and is now facing the risk of losing another. What fun, family entertainment!

Honestly, in spite of several genuinely fun “IF” characters that get too little screen time, I can’t see IF really working for children viewers of any age. This seems to be more aimed at adults who feel wistful about their own inner children.

While Bea’s dad is in the hospital, she goes to stay with her grandmother (Fiona Shaw), where she and her dad had also stayed when her mother was dying. It’s in this building where Bea discovers all the IFs hanging out in a sort of junk room up on the top floor, alongside the one evident human who can also see all the other IFs. This man is played by Ryan Reynolds, who gives a serviceable if surprisingly muted performance. Every once in a while, IF would give me genuine chuckles, among them a running gag where Ryan Reynolds keeps tripping over the one who is invisible.

What purpose these IFs serve in the movie, though, is never presented in a way that quite makes sense. First Bea is helping Ryan Reynolds match IFs with potential replacement kids, like they are running some kind of imaginary orphanage. When that doesn’t pan out, they set about reuniting the IFs with their original kids who are now adults. In one cast, a nervous adult played by Bobby Moynihan gets reassurance from his own IF right before some kind of job interview. What we are supposed to understand is happening there exactly, I couldn’t tell you. This guy’s Imaginary Friend would have been an original figment of his own imagination, right? So he’s gaining confidence for an interview (or presentation, or whatever the hell it is) by tapping into the imagination of his own childhood, in a way that’s beyond his control? What?

The fundamental problem with IF is the evident blank check Krasinski was given after his previous success, where no one else bothered to step in with some guard rails outside his own passion. This movie clearly means something to him, and presumably it made sense in his head. It has some fairly imaginative ideas in it, to be fair, but it also feels like it came from the imagination of someone who recently had a lobotomy.

The story improves, slightly, by the time IF reaches its final half hour or so—a fact that is undermined by the real fear that maybe Bea’s father will also die. Somewhat ironically, the best part of this movie is Fiona Shaw as the grandmother, a character who spends most of the film seemingly unrelated to any of the IFs (although you can probably predict where things are going there). Cailey Fleming as Bea is clearly a talented young performer, but a little mismatched with this movie, having that precocious quality of so many child actors that stops just short of unsettling.

Furthermore, no one in this movie has a conversation that sounds like actual people talking. There is a subplot of a budding friendship between Bea and another little boy in the hospital (Alan Kim), and after their first conversation I literally thought to myself, That was really weird dialogue. In short, Krasinski threw so much talent at his passion project that he could not properly organize it, and the final result is a total mess. If there was anything that genuinely impressed me was how a mess could be not so much chaotic as strangely dull. At least some more consistent gags might have kept me awake.

I’m very sorry to inform you this movie’s condition is terminal.

Overall: C

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MARRIAGE

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Animation: B+
Music: B

According to writer-director Signe Baumane, at a festival screening of My Love Affair with Marriage, a scientist in the audience stood up and declared it the most scientifically accurate film they had ever seen. What a ringing endorsement! From a solitary voice that by definition does not represent scientific consensus! As reported by the filmmaker!

I don’t mean to sound flippant. At the post-screening Q&A I was at, hearing this bit of information, in the moment, I was genuinely impressed. And: for the most part, the surprisingly extensive bits about the physiology and biology behind behaviors and emotions related to romance—in an animated musical—comes across as plausibly accurate. It even features “Biology” as an incredibly charming animated character, narrating these many interludes, a cell serving as the character’s face. The only part of this that I bumped on was a reference to dueling amounts of hormones during fetal development as explanation for a man turning out to be a cross dresser, which struck me as a gross oversimplifcation, of science that is not even fully settled.

To be fair, how to handle such a concept in the context of My Love Affair with Marriage is tricky. Baumane, a Latvian-born filmmaker who is using animation to tell a largely autobiographical story here, actually did marry a Swedish man (here voiced by Matthew Modine) who revealed he was a cross-dresser after they separated—and, this was her second marriage.

And it really should be not only noted, but stressed: this is a story about much more than that, though it’s a vital chapter in the story of the central character here, Zelma (Dagmara Dominczyk). We follow Zelma not just from birth, but conception (or Inception, as the “Prologue” is titled), learn how many of her behaviors and peronality traits are traced back genetically, even to the childhood traumas of her parents. We see that she is born on the Soviet island of Sakhalin, just north of Japan; and soon thereafter moves all the way west to Latvia, where she gets a rude awakening from classmates in regards to gender norms and expectations.

We watch Zelma grow up, learn through culture to lose her confidence as a woman, gain some of it back by selling art, and then eventually get emotionally blackmailed, manipulated and abused by her first husband (Cameron Monaghan). Through all of it, we switch over to “Biology” using neural pathways and chemical reactions to explain Zelma’s decisions and behaviors, a completely objective backdrop for otherwise subjective ideas and choices. What’s happening to our brain when we fall in love? When we have sex? When we kiss? When we get depressed? When we get defensive? When we fall out of love, or fall into resentments? “Biology,” the character (Michele Pawk), may not cover absolutely everything, but she’s memorably comprehensive.

This tension between biological imperatives and erratic behaviors is what really makes the movie, My Love Affair with Marriage, for me. Baumane says she spent a year studying the science, and it really pays off.

The animation style is peculiar, with what often look like photo backdrops onto which are superimposed the animated characters, themselves animated at a low number of frames per minute. I must admit that I wasn’t much into it at first, but I got past it quickly—and the Biology interludes are especially well animated, sort of like animated films from high school health class with nuanced intellectualization. I was not quite as taken with the musical interludes, most of them sung by a trio of “Mythology Sirens,” a few of which are catchy. The best song, with lyrics by Signe Baumane and performed by Storm Large, plays over the end credits.

In the end, I was very taken with My Love Affair with Marriage—and I wish I could tell you how or where to see it. I happened to see a one-time encore showing after it was at the Seattle International Film Festival six months ago; I’m not aware of it having gotten a wide release domestically. My fervent hope is that it winds up on a streamer sooner than later, for more people to discover. This film is the epitome of specificity translating to universal relatability.

Biology illustrates how feelings and behaviors are rooted in things more complex than they might seem.

Overall: B+

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Animation: B

How many Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies have there been now, anyway? Seven, apparently—the first one having been released thirty-three years ago. The film franchise has reached the age Jesus did! I suppose one could make the argument that it’s time for a similar self-sacrifice for the greater good, except that Mutant Mayhem is actually kind of fun.

This is what I keep wondering, though: how many actual teenagers really care? In this new film, which really qualifies as a third reboot of the franchise, a pointed plot point is the fact that our four mutant turtles are fifteen years old. When these versions of the turtle-kids were born, the film franchise was already eighteen years old, and old enough to have been rebooted the first time.

This is an intellectual property based on an original comic book that was first published in 1984. As in, the characters themselves are one year shy of forty years old. I suppose I could be off base here, but I can’t imagine many actual fifteen-year-olds having much in the way of passionate interest in this. Instead, new iterations of this franchise have been trading on nostalgia for it for the past two decades.

Seth Rogen, who co-wrote the script and co-produced, is 41 years old, making him pretty squarely in the target demographic at this point. This is a fun movie for him and people like him. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t think this movie is going to take the youth by storm. It may have been one of many “bonkers-cool” concepts from our childhood, but time is a weird thing, which can turn even the weirdest things into something quaint.

On the other hand, maybe Mutant Mayhem isn’t made for a youth audience. The PG rating is pretty tame, but I found certain elements of it surprisingly dark at times. It actually kind of feels made for the middle-aged fans who have been waiting for a halfway decent film treatment after countless examples of mediocrity, and in that sense, it succeeds.

Not that it’s great. It’s better than mediocre, but not a whole lot better than good. As we watch these teenage mutant ninja turtles pining for a place in the human world outside of the sewer home in which a mutant rat (voiced by Jackie Chan) raised them, we do get a few good laughs out of a sprinkling of cleverly effective gross-out humor.

I suppose I should admit: I think I once saw the original film, in 1990. I would have been fourteen years old. I know I haven’t seen a single one of the other films. I don’t have a whole lot to compare to with authority, at least not that plenty of longtime fans will be apt to compare. The entire premise is, admittedly, pretty stupid. Amazingly, Mutant Mayhem is only the second of the seven films to be animated, and animation is a far better fit for something so over-the-top dumb.

Rogen costars as a mutant rhinoceros goon. He and his co-producers and co-directors Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears (respectively a writer and artist on The Mitchells vs the Machines) sure managed to get a lot of big names for the rest of the voice cast: Maya Rudolph as mad scientist Cynthia Utrom; John Cena as fellow mutant rhino Rocksteady; Rose Byrne as mutant crocodile Leatherhead; Giancarlo Esposito as the mutants’ scientists father; Paul Rudd as Mondo Gecko; Hannibal Buress as Ginghis Frog; and Ice Cube as the villainous literal Superfly.

When it come to the animation style of this film, I have to say, I’m ambivalent. There’s something deliberately messy about it, falling just this side of scribbles, giving everything an off-kilter look. An unsettling number of human characters have their faces drawn with such mismatched and misshapen eyes they consistently made me think of Sloth from The Goonies (another reference most teenagers won’t give a shit about).

As you may have gathered, I’ve had to get past kind of a lot in order to enjoy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. But you know what? I did. Taking myself to see this movie on an early Monday evening—with several other exclusively middle-aged audience members—was not a waste of time. Do I think I would have missed much had I not gone? I suppose not. But it was a fun excursion nonetheless. Even that characterization makes it far better than anyone would reasonably expect the seventh film in an aging lower-tier franchise to be.

Did I mention The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri is also in this? Oh, and the turtles: Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu, and Brady Noon. They’re all fine.

Overall: B

SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-
Animation: A+
Special Effects: A-

Some movies take a while to make clear they are great. Some take a few scenes, a few minutes, for it to sink in that you are watching something special. Once every few years, sometimes even a lot longer, a movie comes along that confidently announces it stands apart as of its opening frame.

The fact that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is one of those movies is just one of many reasons why I love it. A movie this good that’s a sequel skirts the edges of astonishment. Would it be hyperbole to utter this film title in the same breath as The Empire Strikes Back? The Godfather Part II? Maybe. Time will tell. Right now, I am sorely tempted. I mean, I just did it.

I had been deeply impressed with this film’s predecessor, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse when it was released in 2018. It blew me away, and a film so skillfully nuanced, funny, entertaining and beautiful that was both a superhero movie and an animated feature almost defied belief. To say it exceeded expectations would be an understatement. What’s even more amazing is that there’s a strong argument to be made that Across the Spider-Verse is even better.

Its three-person writing team has only one in common with the first film (Phil Lord), and its three-person directing team is entirely new (including Soul co-director Kemp Powers). By definition, they still have to explore the endless possibilities of the wildly overused “multiverse” concept, but these animated films about it not only find almost shockingly clever angles with it, but actually improve with their own iterations. Somehow the convoluted plot mechanics actually make more sense this time around.

And they take their time with it: this movie is 140 minutes long—a record for an animated film—and it doesn’t even finish the story. I’m being careful not to spoil plot details here, but I do think it’s useful to know that the original title for this film was indeed officially Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Part 1. Now they’ve dropped the Part 1 and the next installment will be called Beyond the Spider-Verse. It remains a part 1, though: with tons of story left to go, the film ends with a comic-book style caption: To Be Continued. It was an entertaining experience being in a theater full of people who did not already know to expect this. It was a unique combination of sounds that emitted out of the crowd.

And I cannot stress this enough: those minutes truly fly by. Like its predecessor, the animation is a sight to behold, that being the only consistency across different and distinct animation styles depending on the dimension we’re in. My favorite is the dimension the film opens in—after thrillingly rendered, animated title sequences that flip through dimension styles even through the many production company logos—which is the one home to “Spider-Gwen” (Hailey Steinfeld). The animation itself responds to characters’ emotional states, the colors of their environment flowing in waves away from them like water color paint.

Every style of animation is beautiful, though, an impressive feat given the many different, wildly differing styles, many of them clear visual references to literal comic book drawing and painting styles. This is the kind of literalization in adaptation that movies like this need, giving it a visual depth that augments the incisively written script. The spectacular action sequences are almost incidental, even as they serve the story rather than the other way around, and we become deeply emotionally invested in the relationships—particularly those between the title character, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore, reprising the role even though he’s aged five years whereas teenage Miles is only supposed to be a year older—Moore was in his twenties either way) and his parents (Luna Lauren Vélez and Brian Tyree Henry, both fantastic); also Gwen Stacey and her father (Shea Whigham, voicing a man beautifully drawn). And, of course, Miles and Gwen, whose romantic potential remains a question, whether or not they will be dimension-crossed lovers.

I even liked the villain better this time around, given the knowingly on-the-nose name of “The Spot,” and voiced by Jason Schwartzman. Due to an accident with an Alchemax collider, he’s been rendered a white body with black spots, all of which can be used as portals. The Spider-Verse films are never content with keeping things simple, though, and an alternate dimension Spider-Man from 2099 (Oscar Isaac) seem to exist in a gray area between heroism and villainy.

Across the Spider-Verse reportedly has settings in six different dimensions, but there are channel-surf-like movements through many more, most of which are delightful surprises that I won’t spoil. I simply have to mention my favorite, however, even though few others will care about it as much as I do: “Mumbattan,” which basically splices together Mumnai with Manhattan, and features an Indian Spider-Man named Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni, previously featured in the Deadpool films). Once Miles, Gwen, Spider-Man 2099 and yet another dimensional badass Spider-Woman (Issa Rae) who has her own motorcycle enter the Mumbattan dimension, we are treated to an extended sequence with both fantastic action and a lot of very funny gags that should land well with South Asians. (This is some excellently integrated content for potential international audiences.)

There is an incredible number of characters in this film, apparently some 240 of them, a whole bunch of them in a spectacularly funny and entertaining action sequences featuring seemingly infinite versions of Spider-People (or in multiple cases, Spider-Animals). The humor and gags in this movie come at such an unusually fast and steady clip, I am eager to see it again just to see what I missed the first time around. And this is in the same movie that had me so deeply absorbed in its story and its characters that I actually got misty-eyed. It can be hard to trust any assertion that a movie has everything you could possibly want and more, but in this case, you can take that to the bank. The movie’s producers almost certainly will. This movie is a truly amazing specimen of cinematic craft.

There is simply nothing not to love about this movie.

Overall: A-

GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S PINOCCHIO

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+
Animation: A-

The stop motion animation in Guillermo del Toro’s Pinoicchio may be the best I have ever seen. It’s not quite perfect, but then stop-motion never is. Usually it’s a lot easier to see how it’s done, with diorama scenes shot frame by frame, but for the most part in this film, the character movements are almost shockingly fluid. I can’t imagine the hours that would have had to go into this, and still, this is the longest stop-motion film ever made. (It clocks in at an hour and fifty-seven minutes, although the animation gives way to extended end credits at about 1:50.) The fact that virtually every frame is a uniquely beautiful work of art makes it all that much more of an achievement.

I only wish I could have seen it in a theater. It was released in select theaters on November 9, but apparently not in my local market—both rare and a disappointment. Now, exactly one month later and as of December 9, it is streaming on Netflix. At least a lot more people will now actually be able to see it, I guess. Will they bother, with Netflix’s massive library to choose from? It would seem so: it remains in their top 10 movies currently. Perhaps one day they will figure out they can get the best of both worlds by giving their movies a wide release in theaters, after which millions will still watch it streaming. I would have much preferred seeing this wonderful film in a cinema, but I’m just glad it exists.

Presumably co-writer and co-director Guillermo del Toro’s name is part of this film’s official title in order to differentiate itself from the critically reviled Disney live action version that was also released, all of three months ago. This one might as well be called The Pinocchio Movie Worth Watching.

Parents of small children may well want to be strongly cautioned, however. This is still del Toro we’re talking about: this film goes into some weird, very dark places. I can’t remember another animated feature film that deals with death so frankly—and so extensively. The entire narrative is bookended by deaths pivotal to the plot, and one of the story threads is about Pinocchio himself being impervious to death. Except, because this is a Guillermo del Toro film, Pinocchio is killed and revived several times, each time spending longer in a netherworld populated by card playing rabbit skeletons and a magical Chimera voiced by (naturally) Tilda Swinton. It should be noted that none of this suggests permanent immortality, as human death in this world is indeed permanent, and the rules are different for Pinocchio because he isn’t actually a real boy.

He is, however, a gift offered to Geppetto (David Bradley) by the Chimera’s empathetic sister Wood Sprite (also voiced by Tilda Swinton), in a misguided attempt to ease his grief still unabated many years after the death of his ten-year-old son, Carlo. Both Carlo and Pinocchio are voiced by the immensely talented Gregory Mann, a pubescent boy with a heavenly voice. (His voice reportedly changed during production, necessitating the editing of his voice to match how it sounded from the start.) I didn’t really expect this Pinocchio to be a musical, but it technically is, with characters breaking out into song, albeit not particularly frequently. The songs themselves are just fine, but the voices across the board are wonderful—including that of Ewan McGregor as Cricket. He sounds even better now than he did in the 2001 smash Moulin Rouge!

Cricket, incidentally, provides some much-needed comic relief in an otherwise rather dark movie. This humor itself is also dark much of the time (he keeps getting squished and saying things like “Life is such hideous pain,” which ironically brought me endless joy). In addition to McGregor, though, this deeply stacked cast also includes Christoph Waltz as the villanous carnival puppetmaster; Ron Perlman as a fascist government official in this film del Toro chose to set in World War II Italy; John Turturro as the local village doctor; Tim Blake Nelson as the aforementioned Black Rabbits (apparently based on “Undertaker Rabbits” from the original story). Most amusing of all is Cate Blanchett, who was reportedly so eager to be a part of this film that, when it was the only part left, she happily took the part of Spazzatura, an assistant carnival monkey who speaks almost exclusively in squawks and grunts.

All of these elements combined to leave me thoroughly charmed by Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, which is both recognizably a product of his mind and a uniquely imaginative venture, narratively as well as visually. It does feel a bit more skewed toward adult interests, but it is appropriately rated PG, and older children may enjoy it. They may also be disturbed by it. And that is honestly the most fun thing about it.

Therein lies a rich world of discovery.

Overall: B+

STRANGE WORLD

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Animation: A-

I can just imagine the “anti-woke” mob reacting to Strange World, and how it seemingly checks off all the boxes, making it by far the most pointedly diverse animated feature they have ever made. “Pointedly” can itself be a loaded word, however, because the thing is, within this movie’s premise, the diversity makes literal logical sense: these characters live in a utopian society. The only way that could be true, from global point of view at least, is if several races and sexualities are represented among its population—even if the land of Avalonia is a relatively small, isolated community surrounded by mountains.

Some may argue that Disney Animation Studios is playing with fire, featuring a central character who is an out, gay teenager—much less a multiracial one. Sixteen-year-old Ethan Clade (voiced by eighteen-year-old Jaboukie Young-White, who would have to have been seventeen or maybe even sixteen when recording) has a Black mom, named Meridian (Gabrielle Union), and a White dad named Searcher (Jake Gyllenhaal). He also has a paternal grandfather named Jaeger (Dennis Quaid), and when Jaeger starts asking Ethan if he has a “special someone,” I instinctively braced myself for homophobic judgment from an old White man. Notably, what Jaeger does instead is try to teach Ethan how to impress his crush by showing off. Ethan’s response? “That sounds like a pretty toxic way to start a relationship.”

Which is to say, it’s not as though Strange World is without conflict. It just doesn’t have the types you expect. It doesn’t even have any villain, or even a single hero; it has flawed and wonderful, individual people trying to make their way in the world. The world they inhabit just happens to be a fantastical one—even more so when, in an expedition to find out why the green-electric crops they grow that powers their utopian society finds them deep underground, where every single thing that exists is alive. Eventually, you realize the real premise of this movie is a modern update on the eighties film Innerspace, in which a guy explores the inside of a human body in a microscopic little ship.

Without spoiling too much, I’ll say that it isn’t a human body this time, and actually, the widely diverse cast of characters—including an Asian woman community leader voiced by Lucy Liu and an (also possibly gay) Indian character voiced by Karan Soni—are part of a much larger metaphor Strange World is making. This theme of the film, revealed more clearly as it goes along, has a lot to do with the global community and, as Ethan himself notes when trying to play a specific kind of card game with both his father and his grandfather, “living harmoniously with their environment.” In truth, it’s a little on the nose, even more than I realized: the crop the Clades grow which powers their community gives everything it touches a green shock of electricity. We’re clearly meant to take the idea of “green power” quite literally there.

This isn’t a bad theme, per se, so long as there is finesse in execution, which unfortunately, Strange World somewhat lacks. The script, by Qui Nguyen (who also co-directs, with Don Hall), leans heavily on father-son relationships: Jaeger’s obsession with Searcher continuing his legacy as an explorer, and then Searcher’s similar obsession with Ethan being a homebody farmer just like him. This is the only real source of interpersonal conflict, all of it pretty rote and retreading countless similar relationships in other movies.

What does truly make Strange World worth watching, particularly on the big screen, is its fantastic, and fantastically imaginative, animation. It never reaches the heights of Pixar’s excellence, but it’s fully absorbing nonetheless. The strange under-world of living plants and animals and land masses is a delight to exist in once the Clade family gets there, and the adventurous plot, such as it is, gets much more exciting at that point as well. They are surrounded by organisms they cannot identify, or infer what is a threat to them and what isn’t.

I must also commend the animators in their rendering of Ethan himself. I was genuinely impressed with how he has a recognizably, but subtly, queer vibe. And it’s done without ever resorting to any kind of stereotypes. I cannot help but come back to the diversity of the film’s characters overall: setting aside the fact that its inclusion represents something more nuanced than just “checking boxes,” there remains the fact that, for instance, multiracial families actually exist. When do they ever see themselves in media like this? And then, there is a moment of chaste affection between two gay teenagers that genuinely moved me, just to see it. The world is a much different place than when I was sixteen.

Strange World’s actual subversive message is about the literal world itself, and how it needs to be saved from destruction by the fully diverse spectrum of people who live on it. It even goes so far as to represent how this threat to the very biosphere (though that word is never used in the film) is the result of well-intentioned actions thought to be in humanity’s best interests. As in, it’s nobody’s fault really, but we see the problem now and need to correct it.

It’s just the telling of that particular message that’s a little clumsy, thrown together with the parallel theme of familial legacy. The script could have used a great deal of finessing—this more than anything being why this movie has flopped at the box office—but Strange World is fun to watch anyway, a visual feast.

Ethan talks to the most fun character in the movie, “Splat.”

Overall: B