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

WONKA

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-
Special Effects: C+
Music: B-

An argument has been made that, well, Wonka is for kids, and kids deserve movies too, right? Well, here’ s my counter-argument: the likelihood that kids will indeed enjoy Wonka notwithstanding, there are still kids’ movies out there that are actually good. This is not one of them.

Mind you, it’s not terrible either. But that’s just the thing: there is a Roald Dahl legacy to live up to here, as well as a Gene Wilder legacy, and Wonka falls short on both counts. This movie doesn’t even live up to the 2005 Tim Burton film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I still insist was wonderful, I don’t care how many haters there are out there. Of course, that’s not to say any of these films have held up to the truly classic, enduring 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory—which, astonishingly, was rated G—but, on the flip side, kids today are neither likely to know anything about that film, nor have much interest in watching it if they do. It would be the equivalent of me having any interest in a film released in 1934 when I was ten years old.

The bummer of it right now is, if you want to take your kids to the movies, Wonka is nearly the only option. The only others in multiplexes right now are the animated films Migration and Wish, which are both getting worse responses than Wonka. Wonka, at the very least, is sprinkled with several genuinely charming moments, of the sort that are a signature of director Paul King. (King directed both of the Paddington films, and both of them are far superior to this.) If you’re one of the adults taking kids to this film, well, you’re kind of shit out of luck.

And, to be fair, it’s not just that it doesn’t live up to Roald Dah’s cinematic legacy. From the opening scenes, in which Timothée Chalamet dances with a bunch of people holding “Wonka” umbrellas behind him, the choreography middling and the lyrics unmemorable, I thought: Oh. This isn’t going to be great. The sequence ends with Wonka getting charged a fee for daydreaming, a brief gag that works better than any of the extended theatrics that came before it.

My biggest issue with Wonka is the visual effects. This movie was made on a budget of $125 million, and I just have to wonder: where the hell was the money spent? Just on the talent? Chalamet’s $9 million paycheck is objectively ridiclous, and yet even that is but a fraction of that budget. Once again, the shockingly good Godzilla Minus One comes to mind—that film was made for $15 million, and it looks far better than this.

Wonka is appropriately color saturated for a film that is clearly presented as a musical fantasia. And yet, a huge amount of it is rendered in subpar CGI, giving it a far more artificial look than films about the same character released 52 and 18 years ago. I was especially mystified by the one Oompa Loompa, whose movements are noticeably jerky-jerky. How can a film this expensive to make look so bad? To give credit where credit is due, Hugh Grant imbues the Oompa Loompa with more personality than any single other character in the film, which almost makes up for the bad visual effects. Almost. (Side note: it’s also in this film’s favor that the Oompa Loompa is given full autonomy, and never becomes the stand-in for slave labor that the Oompa Loompas were in either of the previous films.)

To be fair, Timothée Chalamet, an objectively great actor, does his best with what he has to work with. As do a bevy of other big names who make up the supporting cast: Olivia Colman as Mrs. Scrubitt, the innkeeper who tricks Wonka into indentured servitude; Keegan-Michael Key as the Chief of Police, so easily bribed by Wonka’s rival chocolatiers with chocolate that he gains a ton of weight over the course of the film (and I find the idea that this is “fat shaming” to be debatable at best); Rowan Atkinson as Father Julius, also easily bribed with chocolate; Jim Carter as Abacus Crunch, one of the other indentured servants slaving away in the inn basement; even Sally Hawkins, the mom in the Paddington movies and here playing Wonka’s mother in a few flashback sequences. In none of these cases does the actor get as much to chew on as they deserve, in spite of Olivia Colman’s extensive screen time as one of many villains, but the one who most directly steals Wonka’s luck away from him.

Fundamentally, Paul King seems to have missed the point entirely, of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is about a possibly-corrupt, borderline sociopathic chocolatier weeding out the one good little kid in a group of spoiled brats. The only way Wonka’s return to that character’s story, particularly as a prequel, would make sense would be for Willy to learn the same kind of lesson himself as a youngster. Instead, Wonka is presented as pure hearted, and constantly taken advantage of by the adults around him who are the spoiled brats.

There is only one genuine kid in this movie, Calah Lane, who plays Noodle, also toiling away indefinitely in the inn basement. Lane is quite lovely, actually, one of the best things about Wonka, with onscreen charisma that helps keeps the proceedings watchable. But Noodle and Willy are both similarly pure of heart, dealing with heightened, standard kids-movie villains. Willy Wonka is supposed to be backed with subtext, and Wonka, generally pleasant as it is to watch, is all text.

All of that brings us back to this: kids will have a great time. The group of kids in the row of seats behind me, who did not shut the fuck up the entire film, certainly did. Surely they neither know nor care anything about Gene Wilder’s or even Johnny Depp’s iterations of Willy Wonka. For them, there is only Timothée Chalamet. But here’s the key difference: none of those kids are going to grow up regarding this as an unfortgettable classic from their childhoods. It’s just another passable outing at the movies, and in the context of its cinematic legacy, that’s a real shame.

Hugh Grant’s ample charms can’t elevate a middling achievement.

Overall: B-

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

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+

CHIP 'N DALE: RESCUE RANGERS

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

I went back and forth as to whether I would even review this movie, my reaction to it was so . . . lackluster. I daresay I was disappointed, but that’s not entirely the movie’s fault: I let people whose opinions I respect convince me to expect something far better than it was.

The common comparison is to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the groundbreaking film blending live action and animation in 1988, now a marvel also because of its unique blend of both Warner Brothers and Disney cartoon properties. Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is also packed with cultural references, not all of them Disney—but I didn’t notice any Warner Brothers cartoons.

I even heard someone call this movie a new “classic,” and that was really what finally cinched my decision to fire up Disney+ and watch it. A “classic,” this movie is not. If you want to see what a classic really is, just watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, right there on that same streamer. It’s a far, far superior film. Not only that, but it’s a period piece and it holds up: that film could have been released today and it still would have impressed.

Plus, it’s packed with both verbal and visual gags that are far quicker and far smarter than the ones peppered in Chip ‘n Dale. To be fair, the original Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers TV show that ran on the Disney Channel from 1989 to 1990 was not something I ever saw, and nostalgic fans of the show will likely delight in this film and how it trades on that nostalgia. I can understand that much, and appreciate the conceit in this film, in which the characters are the chipmunk actors who played Chip ‘n Dale in the TV show over thirty years ago, and are now a bit washed up. Chip (John Mulaney) works as an insurance agent (“Coercive Insurance” being one of my favorite subtle gags). Dale (Andy Samberg) is attending fan conventions to sign autographs—something that provides ample opportunity for the presence of many other kids’ programming character cameos.

Their friend and former coworker Monterey Jack (Eric Bana) finds himself kidnapped by a shady organization that alters cartoon characters for the purpose of overseas bootlegging, itself a running gag that runs kind of stale, and thus the estranged Chip and Dale reteam in order to attempt a real-life rescue.

It should be noted that the Chip and Dale characters speak with regular voices, not the high-pitched, sped-up voices of their “characters.” This film is filled with meta jokes about “making it” in Hollywood (or not), as well as the seedy side, and has some surprisingly adult jokes that little kids won’t understand: “Now he can’t have kids.” There’s a fun sequence on “Main Street” in which we discover the seedy underbelly of Hollywood toons, who push things like cheese as though they are drugs (Monterey Jack has a problem).

My main criticism is that not all of the gags land, and sometimes there is too much time spent between the gags for things like exposition or character development. I’m sorry to keep coming back to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but that film expertly blended all of those things with its clever humor, and often Chip ‘n Dale goes for easy rather than clever humor. Admittedly, it did get me to laugh out loud a few times.

The overall sense I got from Rescue Rangers, however, was one of a “direct to streamer” movie—and I mean of the sort that was typical before the pandemic. We now can get true quality films direct from streamers, but what Chip ‘n Dale is, is . . . fine. I can’t muster enough enthusiasm to think of it as something to get excited about, and that’s what disappoints me. I had hoped that, at the very least, I could tell people you don’t have to be familiar with the original Disney Channel show for this movie to come highly recommended. Instead, I think perhaps you do need to have seen the show. I have no connection to it, so, in spite of this movie’s many pop culture references, it just didn’t land the way I wanted it to.

At the very least, I will compliment the voice work: John Mulaney and Andy Samberg are great; as are the vast supporting cast of characters, including J.K. Simmons as the police “Captain Putty”; Will Arnett as “Sweet Pete,” an overweight, grown-up Peter Pan; and even Flula Borg as “DJ Herzogenaurach.” We also get Dennis Haysbert as Zipper; Seth Rogen as several characters; and Tim Robinson as “Ugly Sonic,” playing on a notorious internet controversy that no one knows about, and I am unconvinced will be as hilarious as intended for those who do.

Basically, Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is entertaining enough, for something to watch at home with the family. It just fell short of what I wanted or expected.

Did I mention that Dale got “CGI” surgery? Hilarious!

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+