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+

DC LEAGUE OF SUPER PETS

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

I suppose if you take your children, or your niece or your nephew, to see DC League of Super Pets, they will be suitably entertained, and you won’t hate the experience.

That’s about as close as I can get to heaping praise on this movie, which, even as an animated feature, embodies every cliché of comic book superhero movies developed over the past twenty years. It sticks to the formula, following the same story beats as nearly all of the rest of them, with a big, effects-laden climactic battle at the end, the fate of the world (or the city, or the galaxy, or the universe, take your pick) hanging in the balance. It has a few clever one-liners, most of which got burned through in the trailer. It wants you to think it has a sense of humor about itself, with self-referential meta humor, except that it’s all been done before ad nauseam, and ultimately it’s just another in a long line of cash grabs.

And League of Super Pets is very much in the “DC Cinematic Uniiverse,” the opening titles preceded by the glimpses of all the DC heroes in a graphic presentation long known to be part of their attempt at replicating Marvel’s runaway success. This movie doesn’t just feature Superman and his super dog, Krypto, but it features every quasi-human superhero member of the Justice League as a diversified ensemble supporting cast—each of them positioned to wind up with one of the “League of Super Pets” as their own pet.

To be fair, I did kind of enjoy this movie, for a while. Some of the humor, and a few of the animal-based puns (love Krypto’s dad, “Dog-El”), actually land. But, the shtick outlasts its welcome, and you feel all the exact same pieces of the “superhero story” clicking right into place. The truth is, DC League of Super Pets is just another superhero movie, just like countless others that came before it. Grafting the tropes onto domesticated animals doesn’t make it any more original.

If anything makes this movie watchable, it’s the voice talent, which is abundant: Dwayne Johnson as Krypto; Kevin Hart as Ace, the invulnerable dog; Vanessa Bayer as PB, the pig who can change her size; Diego Luna as Chip, the electrified squirrel; Natasha Lyonne as Merton, the speedy turtle; Kate McKinnon as Lulu, the villainous guinea pig; John Krasinski as Superman; Keanu Reeves as Batman; Marc Maron as Lex Luthor, of all people—his second major voice role in an animated feature this year (The Bad Guys isn’t exactly a classic either, but it’s a better movie)—and there are plenty more, in many cases recognizable voices in cameo parts. Every person voicing characters in this movie is clearly having a great time, and that alone makes it more fun to watch.

It’s still pretty forgettable once it’s over. DC League of Super Pets is fun while it lasts, but there’s nothing special about it. It’s just another movie that is almost literally paint-by-numbers and will disappear into the outer rims of the zeitgeist once opening weekend has passed.

Maybe if they’re cut enough you’ll be distracted from how stale it gets.

Overall: C+

LIGHTYEAR

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

At the beginning of Lightyear, we are informed that in 1995, Andy’s favorite toy, Buzz Lightyear, was a toy from his favorite movie. “This is that movie,” it says. After that movie finishes, though, I was left thinking about how children often have bad taste. Like, why would he obsess over toys from this movie?

It’s not that Lightyear is bad. It’s just . . . bleh. And when it comes to the bar set by Pixar Animation Studios in the nineties and 2000s, it might as well actually be bad. If it were actively bad, at least then it would be more interesting. Also, there’s a truly strange irony in this film: easily the most fun character in it is a robot cat, the kind of thing tailor made for merchandising. But in 1995, the marketers of this “movie” never made any toy SOX the Robot Cats to sell? And Andy was only interested in Buzz Lightyear, and (in the case of Toy Story 2), Zurg toys? Apparently Andy was a lot weirder kid than we realized.

Lightyear is clearly, objectively, a crowd-pleasing movie. The showtime I went to had plenty of actively engaged children in the audience, which erupted in applause when the film ended. It’s always so strange to me when people do that. Who do they think is there to appreciate it? This movie is getting relatively mixed reviews, and it’s easy to see why.

That’s why, even though the movie is successfully, if formulaically, entertaining, I found it to be kind of a bummer. I won’t go so far as to say Pixar has jumped the shark, but this movie is a definite step in that direction. We already got an arguably unnecessary Toy Story 4 in 2019, but at least it had the comfort of a familiar universe with long beloved voices. Now Disney and Pixar is just milking the original Pixar intellectual property for all it’s worth, branching out into odd-angled spinoffs.

And the thing is, the principal characters in Lightyear just aren’t nearly as compelling as those in the Toy Story series. That franchise had a novel concept: kids’ toys come to life when they aren’t looking. Lightyear is just a straightforward science fiction tale, with a lot of production design oddly reminiscent of the Alien franchise. Nothing here feels particularly original. I should be lauding Disney, I suppose, for making Lightyear’s best friend a lesbian (voiced by Uzo Aduba). But the trouble I have with this “feature” of the film is that it feels written expressly for that purpose, and that purpose only.

The one character I kind of loved was SOX, the aforementioned robot cat. Nearly all of the humor in Lightyear that actually lands is in relation to SOX. Very little of SOX’s critical role in the plot makes sense, but then neither does the rest of the plot. But, there are several gags delivered by or through SOX, as voiced by Peter Sohn, that got to me. I love me a cat character, even if it’s actually a robot, and any humorous bit involving a hairball. Or robot-paws typing away at a computer and figuring out complex equations. Everything about SOX is amusing and cute as hell. I wish the movie had been about SOX.

Chris Evans is well cast as the voice of Buzz Lightyear, but Lightyear lacks a certain angle, maybe even a gimmick—like, say, a Buzz Lightyear toy who doesn’t realize he’s a toy. That’s funny stuff. The “movie character” Lightyear just has to learn to accept that he makes mistakes. Yawn!

There’s a lot of time-travel that happens in Lightyear, with the title character obsessively “testing the hyperdrive” of a ship meant to get a marooned community off of a hostile planet. These are complex ideas that must by definition be oversimplified in an animated feature, and every time Buzz leaves the planet, only a few minutes go by for him but anywhere from four to 22 years passes for the people on the ground. This is how he winds up returning after one of many trips to find his best friend has passed away, and later meeting her grown granddaughter, Izzy (Keke Palmer). I’d be a lot more interested in a live-action drama about the implications of these evolving relationships.

But, of course, I’m a sometimes cynical 46-year-old, trying to hold Pixar to the same standards they had 27 years ago. That fact would be easier to dismiss if not for the fact that Lightyear exists on the assumption of an audience connection with a film that came out 27 years ago. True, the Toy Story movies have captured the imaginations of multiple generations of children, but it’s difficult to see how any of them will connect with Lightyear the same way just because of that tenuous connection. The young children dazzled by this movie don’t know any better.

The animation is competent, at least, if not jaw dropping the way that so many of Pixar’s previous films have been. And while Lightyear is engaging from start to finish, if a little rushed in its plot development (something no child is going to give a shit about), there’s a bit of Pixar soul that feels like it’s missing. I may need to rewatch Soul (2020) just as a palette cleanser.

We’re also treated to Taika Waititi and Dale Souls as … more forgettable characters. Stick with SOX the robot cat.

Overall: C+

THE BAD GUYS

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

The Bad Guys may be the most “kids’ movie” movie I’ve watched and still managed to enjoy with adult eyes. It’s about as silly as it gets, but still fits in a few clever gags that fly over kids’ heads and right into the comic sensibilities of grownups. It’s clever enough, I was very much entertained, and the animation is fairly impressive, particularly its detailed urban backgrounds that seem to render Los Angeles as though it had more of a New York City density.

I say all this even though I’m still the dipshit sitting there confused by the inconsistent rules of the movie’s universe. Mind you, this movie is aimed squarely at children, and they don’t care about this stuff, like: how do characters that are a piranha and a shark (voiced by Anthony Ramos and Craig Robinson, respectively) able to survive without water? They exist as two-legged land animals! I guess I shouldn’t be stuck on this; there’s also a humanoid shark in The Suicide Squad and I didn’t have any hang-ups about that; in fact I was delighted by that demented movie.

I suppose a key difference is that The Bad Guys is the farthest thing from demented—although there are subtle moments of dark humor, particularly when it comes to Snake, who is easily distracted by all the guinea pigs he wants to eat.

That said, I still couldn’t help but to be distracted by the fact that, in the world of this movie, only the principal characters are animal characters, and everyone else in this world seems to be human. There is the quasi-butch Chief of Police, Misty Luggins (Alex Borstein), who is human, but otherwise the five “Bad Guys” are a wolf, a snake, a spider, a shark and a piranha; then there’s Governor Diane Foxington (Zazie Beets), a fox; and Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade), a guinea pig.

No other intelligent being in this universe is a talking animal, though. There’s even a massive army of guinea pigs at one point, and all of them are like regular animals. How do they become like that, but Professor Marmalade becomes an intelligent being with a British accent? There’s also a kitten who gets stuck in a tree and all it does is meow. What’s with all these inconsistencies? I want answers!

To be fair, the same sort of thing happens in old fairy tales. Little Red Riding Hood happens upon a talking wolf, after all. And a big plot point in The Bad Guys is that all of these animals are species that people are automatically afraid of, without even giving them the chance at being perceived as “good.” As a band of thieves and bank robbers, they are just meeting the fate society has created for them. But then Wolf gets an unexpected bit of appreciation when he saves an old lady from falling down the stairs, and gets a taste of what if feels like to be appreciated for goodness, and thus the plot is set into motion.

As already indicated, I’m the only one obsessing on the inconsistent rules of this universe. It still would have made a lot more sense if every character in this world were an animal (as in Zootopia, a similarly themed but better movie), but whatever. I’ll get over it! The voice talents alone go a long way, with Sam Rockwell as Wolf; Awkwafina as Tarantula; and Marc Maron as Snake, taking an unusual turn for his career, and one that’s a great fit.

The Bad Guys is almost pointedly over-the-top ridiculous, something that can really work against a film regardless of its target audience. But here, it somehow works, and I found myself charmed by it. They can’t all be classics, but they can be at least as entertaining as this. If nothing else, it seems obvious that kids love it, which is all a movie like this needs. It’s a bonus that I also enjoyed it.

You can’t help but love them all, in spite of an unnecessarily extensive running gag about piranha farts.

Overall: B

TURNING RED

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

Turning Red is simultaneously about adolescent friendship and about mother-daughter relationships, and it handles both fantastically. The premise seems simple, in which a 13-year-old discovers she transforms into a giant red panda whenver she gets too emotionally excited, but it winds up being a great allegory for multiple shared experiences at once. There’s the idea of “harnessing your inner beast.” There’s acknowledging your “messy side.” There’s the literalness of the title, when an adolescent goes beet red with embarrassment. There’s even a brief sequence in which it effectively stands in as a symbol for when a girl has her period for the first time: “I’m a gross red monster!” One might thing I’m reaching with that one—except it literally happens when Mei’s mother, not yet understanding the true nature of the situation, is trying to offer her pads.

Things like this are surely why Turning Red is rated PG. It’s also the third Pixar movie to be released directly to Disney+, although it’s arguably the first not to be done out of necessity. That said, after having watched it, this film feels right for an at-home streamer. Perhaps we’ve just been spoiled by 27 years of Pixar Animation’s visual excellence, where in many cases the animation largely made up for somewhat waning story quality. Turning Red flips the script, so to speak, and offers animation that is . . . fine. It’s the story that truly elevates it, and makes for a wonderfully cozy, adorable, funny and moving at-home watch.

This movie happens to be the second Pixar film directed by a woman (the first was Brenda Chapman, though she co-directed Brave in 2012 with two men), the first to be solo directed by a woman, and the first to be directed by a woman of color. Domee Shi, who also co-wrote this delightful script, was born in China but grew up in Toronto, and having written largely based on her own family experience, thus provides the explanation for the film’s Toronto setting. Characters mention the city of Toronto regularly, and there are many establishing shots of the Toronto skyline, always with the CN Tower figuring prominently. I just found myself wishing those shots were rendered with a little more depth and personality; instead, they sometimes feel a little like a cartoon version of old movie matte painting backdrops.

Admittedly, this sort of thing was why it took a few minutes for me to really feel hooked into the story of Turning Red. The visual design of the characters themselves are a little “cartoonier” than normal for Pixar, and for the first several minutes we see the establishment of setting and the introduction of characters, particularly Meilin (voiced by 16-year-old newcomer Rosalie Chang) and her diverse group of three best friends (voiced by Ava Morse, Hyein Park and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). We see them quite pointedly and realistically acting like giddy, sometimes shrill, 13-year-old girls, and for a moment there I wondered if I would be able to tolerate this movie.

But, then we get introduced to Mei’s perfectionist mother, Ming (Sandra Oh), and we understand the central conflict of the story, which is a tension between Mei’s love for her mother and her love for her friends. Domee Shi and her two co-writers, Julia Cho and Sarah Streicher, write about these relationships exceedingly well, never painting anyone involved as inherently malicious. They are just people who make mistakes, who sometimes make misguided decisions in the service of the people they love.

By the time Meilin’s red panda is unleashed, Turning Red takes a quick turn, becoming equal parts entertaining and surprisingly layered, both with thematic meaning and cultural tradition. I love the diversity of both the characters and the voice cast here, not just for its own sake, but more importantly, because it accurately reflects the city in which it’s set: Toronto is one of the most multicultural and cosmopolitan cities in the world, more than half its residents belonging to a visible minority group, and just under half being immigrants born outside the country.

Mei’s family is well established, though, both her and her mother speaking with American accents; only Mei’s grandmother, Wu (voiced by Wai Ching Ho), speaks with a Chinese accent. Cantonese is regularly spoken, particularly when Grandma Wu arrived with reinforcements—both herself and other family members, presumably aunts, who have all at one point participated in a ritual that breaks the family spell of the red panda.

I also love how centered this story is on women and girls. Turning Red is written and directed by a woman, largely based on her childhood experience with several girl friends, and nearly the entire principal cast is girls or women. The most notable male character is Ming’s husband and Mei’s father, Jin (Orion Lee), and even he is written with more dimension than typically found with a part of that size. Which is to say, he doesn’t get a huge amount of screen time, but he is well woven into the fabric of the story.

The focus here, though, is on Mei’s relationship with the girls and the women in her life: her three best friends; her mother; her grandmother. The story even gets into how that mother-daughter relationship is informed by Ming’s relationship with her own mother—an idea relatable to a great many daughters and mothers, regardless of ethnic or cultural background. Were Turning Red made in an earlier cinematic era, most of the story would have revolved around Mei trying to keep her red panda spell a secret. Instead, Mei’s mother, her friends, and most of her classmates learn about it surprisingly early on. What follows is a struggle for Mei to control it, and her mother’s insistence that it needs to be locked away completely. There’s a lot to unpack here in terms of accepting ourselves—and our children—as who they really are, and not so much taming but learning to live with the beast within.

There is a climactic sequence in which an even more giant panda terrorizes a stadium during a boy-band concert, and it’s a little like a red panda version of Godzilla. If that were all it was, I might have rolled my eyes at it. But there is so much depth to this story, even a showy sequence like that works really well. Given Pixar Animation Studio’s increasingly spotty record in recent years, and the somewhat surprising choice to release straight to streaming, Turning Red exceeds expectations on nearly every level . . . except the animation itself. But, as with our relationships with our children and our parents, we can’t always expect perfection.

This is so embarrassing!

Overall: B+

LUCA

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

Someone I follow on Twitter called Luca “Call Me By Your Name meets The Shape of Water,” and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that. This movie is indeed about sea monsters, after all, two of which turn into young boys who form a relationship that seems, from the right angle, at least romantic-adjacent.

This is a Disney-Pixar film, after all, and rest assured that, in sharp contrast to those other two movies, there’s no fucking in this one. I mean, you might as well say this movie is “Call Me By Your Name meets Elisa Fucks a Fish.” Side note: this has to be the first review I have ever written of a movie for children in which I reference fucking not once, but twice. Oh wait, that makes three. This review is not for children!

I mean, of course it isn’t. No children give a shit what some 45-year-old looking for queer subtext thinks about some Disney movie they’re sure to find perfectly entertaining. I do have a bit of a flip-side suspicion here, though. I’m not sure it’s an accident that Disney opted to release Luca straight to Disney+ without even a limited theatrical release. I have to admit, by Pixar standards, or at least by the bar they set themselves decades ago, this one is comparatively . . . let’s say, slight. The story has what we might have called twenty years ago a bit of a “straight to video” quality.

That is, I suppose, unless you’re looking for the aforementioned queer coding. Whether that was any part of director and co-writer Enrico Casarosa’s intention is anybody’s guess, although if you happen to have seen Call Me By Your Name, especially considering this film’s Italian setting, it’s hard not to see some similarities. And then there’s the pretty direct reference, near the end, to how some humans will accept him and some of him won’t, but “he seems to know how to find the good ones.” If nothing else, it has a pure and sweet message about friendship and finding your tribe even if something about you makes you different.

And Luca is an undeniably sweet, often adorable little movie. It just doesn’t have the depth, or the expansive world building, that typically sets Pixar apart. These are sea creatures after all, and we spend some time in their underwater world, but there doesn’t seem to be much to their ecosystem—their habitat it exceedingly simple and surprisingly lacking in aquatic diversity. Finding Nemo, this is not. Curiously, when Luca transforms into human form on land and befriends a local girl, she ignites in him an interest in astronomy, with a couple fantasy sequences in celestial space—which, again, pale in comparison to the Pixar masterpiece WALL-E (which I like now even more than I did upon its release; that film aged into a modern classic). Even the very conceit of sea monsters turning into human form on land brings to mind The Little Mermaid, giving the story an overall sense of being derivative.

I can say this much: I enjoyed Luca more than I did the latest offering from Disney Animation Studios, Raya and the Last Dragon. Objectively speaking, I would say that and Luca average out to about the same level of quality, just for different reasons. Raya has better plotting and better artistic design; Luca has better voice performances and overall better animation sequences.

Speaking of the voice talents, Luca’s title character is played by Jacob Tremblay, who was nine in Room and is fourteen now, but was likely thirteen when voice recording took place. Speaking of which, knowing that Luca was made at home during the COVID-19 pandemic does make one wonder how much more expansive its world-building might have been had they managed to produce the film in the studio. Putting it in that context does make the film seem a bit more impressive.

Not that any of the kids who are the target audience are going to be thinking about that—nor are they going to care all that much that, for instance, Luca’s parents are voiced by Maya Rudolph an Jim Gaffigan, or that Sacha Baron Cohen shows up in a brief but amusing scene as the anglerfish-like Uncle Ugo. They’ll merely be sufficiently entertained. I’m not sure what makes an animated feature completely addictive to young children, as in a phenomenon like Frozen or Finding Nemo. I just know that Luca doesn’t have it. It’s above above average by Disney standards and fairly middle-of-the-road by Pixar standards, but it looks great and has its charms in the moment, fleeing as they might seem once the movie ends.

Don’t get them wet! No, this isn’t Gremlins. Is no one going to talk about how he has a glass of water?

Overall: B

RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON

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

There’s a lot to like about Raya and the Last Dragon, which is finally available at no extra cost to Disney+ members as of today. It features two princesses, one the protagonist and one the antagonist; neither of them are given a love interest in a story about learning and earning trust; it features representation and influences heretofore not seen in Disney animated features (in this case, Southeast Asian). It also has some impressively rendered CG animation which, I’m sure, must have looked quite nice on a big screen, for the people that went ahead and saw it in movie theaters.

I just really wanted to like it more. All of the above features are great and all, but they could have been helped a lot further along by better writing. Granted, this is an animated feature and thus aimed at children first and foremost, but there’s still no reason to patronize them. As Raya (Kelly Marie Tran), our heroine, moves about her journey, the coming beats of her story are telegraphed to us well before they occur, as is the lesson she is meant to learn. In the end, this film just serves as an example of how the animation may be on par, but the storytelling over at Disney Animation Studios remains almost pointedly inferior to that over at Pixar.

Also, I’m not the biggest fan of the dragon design. Much of the animation in this film is great—particularly the symmetrical patterns throughout the prologue sequence offering an overview of the history in this fantasy world—but the dragons look like the love child of a unicorn and a ferret. Or, imagine the luckdragon from The NeverEnding Story with a horn, eyeliner and a blowout.

There are ten credited writers on this film—two for screenwriting and a whopping eight for story. You’d think they’d be able to brainstorm a bit more wit than actually winds up in the dialogue here, although it’s not for lack of trying. There are plenty of attempts at gags and punchlines in Raya, but most of them are surprisingly limp, particularly by usual Disney standards. To be fair, I did get a few good chuckles out of two or three visual gags. Awkwafina voices Sisu, the “last dragon” of the title, and there are shades of Robin Williams in Aladdin in the spirit of her performance. Yet, she’s far more charismatic than she is funny, and her raspy voice feels somewhat incongruous with the polished visual sheen of the dragon character.

I don’t want you to think I actively disliked this movie, which most of this review thus far no doubt sounds like. I’m a big fan of the under-seen representation at play here, and of the multiple new directions given to princesses: it can’t be denied that young women have never been depicted so independent and self-sufficient in past Disney features, not to mention there being more than one of them, even existing on both sides of conflict. That alone makes it a great movie for impressionable young girls to see—and boys as well, of course. If nothing else, it passes the Bechdel Test early and often. Between that and the often beautiful animation, Raya and the Last Dragon undeniably has a lot to offer. And I haven’t even mentioned the several pretty exciting action sequences—more than one of them, again, featuring martial arts battles between two women.

I just wish it weren’t all at the expense of sharp writing. This team of writers was so busy broadening their horizons—and, to their credit, doing it well—that they neglected the narrative polish needed to make this the great movie it could have been. As it is, it merely hovers somewhere in the space between fine and good.

Maybe she’s born with it . . .

Overall: B

THE MITCHELLS VS THE MACHINES

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

There’s a lot I very much enjoyed about The Mitchells vs the Machines, and there’s a lot about it I found dumb or annoying. In the latter case, I have this sneaking fear that it’s just because I’ve gotten old and out of touch.

I mean, what’s the target demographic of this movie, anyway? The main protagonist being a young woman about to go to college—in the end casually revealed to be queer, no less—notwithstanding, it is clearly young children. I am 45 years old. Some disconnect here is inevitable.

This film is made by Sony Pictures Animation, which has made a few great animated features (especially Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse), but also a lot of pretty forgettable stuff. You could argue back and forth about this: such an assessment is merely a matter of opinion. But, history still doesn’t like: unlike, say, Pixar Animation Studios, Sony hasn’t made much in the way of animated feature film classics. On the other hand, maybe the more pertinent question these days is: does that matter? I can’t really deny that The Mitchells vs the Machines will be wildly entertaining for plenty of viewers. This movie has been available to stream on Netflix for a week and it’s still #2 on their Top Ten list.

So, what difference does it make what I have to say about it? Do you want to know about how meta my thoughts about it got while I was watching it? Like, this movie regularly pokes fun at our tech-obsessed society, and yet it could never exist without the very technology it criticizes. Or maybe, is there some underlying layer where it’s making fun of our fear of A.I. rising up against us? There is literally a line where, right after a knowing throwaway line about giving tech companies far too much power, a character declares “it’s not all bad.”

Honestly, my biggest issue with this movie is the editing. Way too much going on at any given time, almost from beginning to end, in a movie that goes on for 113 minutes and would have worked better at 90. Relentlessly rapid-fire editing is just pandering to short attention spans. But is there a moral value to that, really? Perhaps not. Still, I find myself far more impressed with pacing that can keep us in rapt attention while still allowing the story to breathe. It is possible.

I cannot deny the clever wit in the writing, though. Even while I was finding myself overwhelmed with this movie’s aesthetic of sensory overload, it regularly cracked me up. Just the sequence where the robots turning off the world’s wifi causes the collapse of society—I don’t want to spoil it, but suffice it to say, I found it very funny. There were several moments when I really laughed pretty hard.

The Mitchells vs the Machines also has a massive lineup of famous talent among its voice actors: Danny McBride and Maya Rudolph as Rick and Linda Mitchell; John Legend and Chrissy Teigen as their social media-perfect neighbors John and Hailey Posey; Eric André as Zuckerberg-esque tech mogul Mark Bowman; Fred Armisen and Conan O’Brien as different robot voices. They are all fine; truth be told, they could have cast complete unknowns in these roles and it would have made no difference. The one possible exception is the inspired casting of Oliva Colman as the villain, the “personal assistant” program who refuses to accept becoming obsolete and takes over all the world’s computers. She never changes from being a simple face on a smart phone screen, which allows for a lot of great sight gags.

I wonder what kind of licensing deals they got for product placement in this film? There’s an entire sequence in which the Mitchell family battles an army of Furbys. Did Hasbro get money for that? Does the fact that the product’s inclusion trades on nostalgia more than anything else make any difference? I did enjoy the sequence, in any case. In the same sequence, the Mitchells are met with another army of kitchen appliances that all have “PAL” microchips in them.

It really should be noted that, my many criticisms aside, The Mitchells vs the Machines succeeds at a kind of casual inclusiveness rarely seen in any movie, but especially in an animated feature. Katie Mitchell (voiced by Abbi Jacobson), the aforementioned queer protagonist, looks white on first glance but is still clearly a multi-racial character: all characters are rendered as the race of their voice actors, so her mother (Maya Rudolph) is a person of color. Their neighbors, the Poseys, as a Black family. There are even subtle hints to Katie’s queerness throughout the movie; I kept wondering about the rainbows in the quasi-fantasy sequences about her (which are references to her interest in digital art) and whether or not they signified anything. A single line near the end of the film pulls it all together, the kind of line that in any other movie would have felt shoehorned in, but here was what tied together a bunch of details already seen.

In short, the writing in this movie is unusually skilled and nuanced, not to mention frequently hilarious. I just felt the movie got bogged down a bit by throwing way too much onscreen at once too much of the time, but maybe that’s just me.

Spoiler alert! The Mitchells adopt a couple of robots.

Overall: B

A SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE: FARMAGEDDON

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

It’s been long enough since the first Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015), I kind of forgot I had seen it. Turns out, I quite enjoyed it then, and this sequel, Farmageddon, is just as enjoyable. I can’t necessarily say any adults need to rush onto Netflix (where it is currently streaming) to watch it on their own, but, if you have younger children, they will enjoy it, and you will enjoy watching it with them.

Not that any of the children in the target demographic will pay any attention to such a nitpicky detail, but it seems odd that its official title is so unduly long: A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon. And yet, when watching the movie, when the title appears in the opening credits, all it says is Farmageddon. The word gets seen a lot in the movie, too, because of The Farmer coming up with the get-rich scheme of turning his farm into a “Farmageddon Theme Park,” constructing it with the help of Bitzer the dog, and a flock of sheep in hard hats.

Farmageddon takes a decidedly science fiction turn, with the arrival of an adorable child-alien, which looks rather like a purple Dr. Seuss tree come to life, with a rotund head at its peak and bunny-like floppy ears. It also has four arms. There is a specific visual aesthetic to the design of Shaun the Sheep, and the rendering of this little alien fits right into it—truly unlike any other alien you’ve ever seen, but fitting perfectly into this universe.

Shaun, for his part, takes it upon himself to help the alien get back to its little space ship and find its way back home. As with all other Shaun the Sheep titles (a TV show, one previous feature film), there is no discernible dialogue at all. You could have closed captioning turned on (as I tend to), and there is no text to read: absolutely everything about the storytelling is done visually. This actually makes a film like this more impressive, given its 86-minute run time and the pacing really never lags. This film is jam packed with visual humor and sight gags. Some of it is slyly included for the parents watching, as with the tones emitted when some buttons are pushed, which mimic the famous tones from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The lack of dialogue does mean there’s not much to say about the vocal performances, even though it does have them: around ten voice actors are credited for the major characters. They just make jumbled and mumbled vocal sounds. In some cases, the alien perfectly copies both the voices of other characters and, in some cases, the sounds of machines or a horn or whatever. And whatever this movie lacks in voice talent, it more than makes up for everywhere else—particularly in its wonderful animation and its editing, which is outstanding considering the stop-motion animation being put together.

The plot also features a villainous woman intent on capturing the alien, though of course the resolution of her story arc at the end turns out to be something sweet. Such is the sensibility of this entire film, which is so cute and so sweet you’ll have cavities by the time it’s over. I say that as a compliment.

Farmageddon is one of five films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and I remain convinced that Pixar’s Soul deserves the award. I’ll say this much: Farmageddon is better than Pixar’s other offering, also nominated in the same category, Onward, which was . . . fine. The previous Shaun the Sheep movie was also nominated, at the 2016 Academy Awards, when it lost to . . . Pixar’s Inside Out—the best movie of that year. Aardman Animations has other Oscars, though, so they’re doing fine. This will just have to be one of those years when it’s an honor to be nominated.

Look on in wonder—or at least giggle—at this delightful kids’ movie.

Overall: B+

FROZEN II

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

It’s been six years since Frozen unleashed itself onto the zeitgeist, inexplicably striking a cord with millions of children—particularly little girls—the world over, creating a generation obsessed with one animated feature to an extent not seen in at least two decades. In all likelihood, Disney could never have predicted such a visceral audience reaction to a movie that was merely lots of fun and yet so clearly not a “classic” in the same way many of its earlier films were. What absolutely could be predicted was that they would come back with a sequel, although waiting six years was an unusually long time. (Pixar has several sequels after many more years than that, but Pixar is in a separate category from Disney Animation Studios.) All those kids who were little in 2013 aren’t so little anymore.

But, plenty more little kids have been discovering Frozen in the years since, and as such it is hardly a surprise that Frozen II will be by a wide margin the #2 movie of Thanksgiving weekend. Does it stack up to its predecessor, then? I’d say it does. Granted, it has no standout, immortal track like the original’s “Let It Go,” but to be fair, the producers of the first film probably had no idea they had lighting in a bottle six years ago. They seem somewhat to try repeating it with the song “Into the Unknown” this time around, and the effort shows. That rarely works.

In spite of that, I found myself rather enamored with Frozen II, and even its music. Just because it has nothing that stacks up to the catchiness of “Let It Go” does not preclude its own music from being quite lovely—and it is. I even got a little misty-eyed a couple of times just listening to the songs in this film. That could be because I am just a sentimental old sap, or maybe the music is actually good. The singing certainly is, what with the likes of Idina Menzel (as Elsa), Kristen Bell (as Anna), Jonathan Groff (as Kristoff) and even Josh Gad (as Olaf) on all of the vocals.

There’s not much point in getting into the plot of this sequel, except to say that the magical harmony of this universe is threatened, and sisters Elsa and Anna must help each other to save it. Once again, they do this on their own terms, without waiting for a man ot be their hero. It should be stressed as well, though, that the male characters here are hardly useless; feminism, even as subtext, does not render men pointless. In fact, both Kristoff and Olaf lend this film its greatest charms. And all of this is to say, it’s pretty much more of the same as what we saw before. But, what’s the problem with more of the same when what we got before was quite wonderful? Frozen II is a welcome reminder of magical storytelling done right.

It could even be argued that the original Frozen need not be seen first to understand and enjoy Frozen II, although it certainly provides some depth of understanding of the sisterly relationship between Elsa and Anna. The animation is very well rendered, particularly the depiction of a rush of water through a fjord, and a water-horse with running streams as its mane. Ultimately, Frozen II is a feast for the eyes as well as the heart.

The only major drawback was as soon as the end credits began and so did Panic! at the Disco’s rendition of “Into the Unknown,” and trust me, that’s the right moment to “nope” right out of there.

A captivating experience, same as before.

Overall: B+