Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on gigantic television.
I genuinely try to go into movies that I watch wanting things to be good, and I always try to approach every film as neutrally as possible. I admit that I went into Sketch with some real reservations. Sketch was produced by Angel Studios, which is run by the Mormon church. These are the same people who made Sound of Freedom, and who generally make movies that are available in theaters as “special events” on a random Tuesday. To that point, the “Special Features” section of the DVD has a promo for the Tuttle Twins; if you’re not familiar, they are libertarian cartoons for kids, or more appropriately, right-wing propaganda for children in grade school.
But, I watched it anyway, and it does seem to be evidence of the idea that even a blind squirrel finds the occasional nut. Sketch is inventive, fun, and actually feels in a lot of ways healthy in terms of the psychology of the kids involved and the family situation. This was far better than I expected. Sometimes, you just have to take a flyer on something and it pays off.
Amber Wyatt (Bianca Belle) is a troubled young girl dealing with the loss of her mother. Her father Taylor (Tony Hale) does his best, as does her older brother Jack (Kue Lawrence), but Amber frequently acts out in school. She does this mainly through drawing things that are often horrible and violent and frequently aimed at depicting harm coming to her bully, Bowman Lynch (Kalon Cox). The school counsellor gives Amber a notebook and tells her to draw anything in it to prevent things from coming out in a negative way.
It’s Jack who starts things happening. Near the family house, he slips and drops his phone into a pond. He reaches down into the pond with a hand that he scraped up in the fall to retrieve the phone. Later that night, he discovers that the cuts on his hand have healed and that his phone works again. He tests this out by putting the pieces of a broken plate into the pond and having it come out repaired.
So, what we need to have happen is getting Amber’s notebook into the pond. That’s going to happen when she catches her brother planning on putting their mother’s ashes into the pond in the hopes of resurrecting her. Her notebook falls in instead, and now all of the creatures that she has created—things that steal people’s possessions, drink blood, cut people in half (or stab them really hard in the stomach), and more start crawling out of the pond.
On the surface, Sketch is exactly that—the Wyatts and eventually Amber’s bully are attacked by the crude drawings of Amber’s notebook and they need to figure out a way to survive. It’s sort of a feature-length version of the Spongebob cartoon with the magic pencil, or a somewhat darker version of Harold and the Purple Crayon.
Of course, this is really a movie about loss and dealing with loss, especially in the minds of young children, and in this respect, Sketch is remarkably aware. It treats the pain that these kids are going through as something real and potentially devastating. It’s not maudlin or simplistic and also doesn’t make the mistake of turning this into an After School Special, which is honestly a bit of a surprise, given the source of the funding.
In truth, Sketch does almost everything correctly. The addition of D’Arcy Carden as Taylor’s sister, constantly frustrated by his actions as she is trying to sell his house, is a good one. Carden has a particular on-camera presence that she exploited well in The Good Place and does here to much the same effect. Tony Hale, most familiar as Buster Bluth from Arrested Development, shows that he has some real range in playing a character who is doing his best to cope with a terrible loss and not let the cracks show through.
The kids are genuinely good actors in this. The main three child actors haven’t done a great deal else (Kue Lawrence has a respectable number of credits), but they definitely should. These are kids who look and act and sound like kids on camera. They aren’t specifically precocious or wisecracking. They’re just kids, and given how difficult that seems to be to find, it’s worth noting.
The monsters are fun as well. They are perhaps a bit too crude for a child of Amber’s age—they look a few years younger in terms of artistic skill, but in the context of the story, they work. There’s a certain charm to them, even while they are often horrifyingly disturbing.
Like I said at the top, I was prepared to dislike this and I didn’t. That’s always a fun surprise.
Why to watch Sketch: It’s inventive and very entertaining.
Why not to watch: Putting money in the pocket of the Mormon church.
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