At Least They Didn't Name Him Ryan

Film: The Wild Robot
Format: Streaming video from Peacock on Fire!

Animated movies, the common wisdom is, are for kids. To be fair, most of them are for kids, at least in terms of the main audience. It takes a great deal of talent from the film makers to create an animated movie that is going to be entertaining for kids and keeps their attention and doesn’t bore adults silly. And, while I think that’s not always a talent that everyone has, it’s definitely a quality that the best of animated films have. This brings us to The Wild Robot, one of the more critically-acclaimed animated movies of last year.

While I am going to talk about the story, I first want to talk about exactly what makes this film work as well as it does in the main: it gets our relationship with “things” right. For a lot of science fiction, the basic thought is that people don’t really care about their tools or the things that they have around them, and this is absolutely ridiculous. Humans will pack bond with anything. It’s why we as the average adult tear up when we contemplate the Mars rover Opportunity, its mission gone on so much longer than planned, sending out the message “My battery is low and it’s getting dark” before signing off forever. That truth—the fact that we will force personality onto our toaster—is what makes The Wild Robot work as a film.

Evolution

Film: The Croods
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on The Nook.

A lot of animated features take a great deal of liberty with how they depict reality, but few take as many liberties as The Croods. That’s not always a bad thing, but I do have to wonder why the creators of this film decided to take so much liberty with the reality of the animal kingdom. It seems completely unnecessary. I get the point of the modern references in a film about cavemen, but the flora and fauna of this world are like a human prehistory viewed through the lens of psilocybin mushrooms.

So we have the Croods, a family of cave people who live in an isolated spot that gets very little daylight since they are in the bottom of a narrow canyon. They are led by the father figure Grug (Nicolas Cage) and Ugga (Catherine Keener). Their children are oldest child Eep (Emma Stone), middle child Thunk (Clark Duke), and feral infant Sandy (Randy Thom). Also with the family is Ugga’s mother Gran (Cloris Leachman). Most of the family is scared of everything, coming out of the cave only to hunt for food for a few minutes a day before retreating to the safety and darkness of the cave. Eep, though, wants something more than just life in a cave and being scared of everything.

Owner's Manual Not Included

Film: How to Train Your Dragon
Format: Streaming video from Amazon on rockin’ flatscreen.

Movies made for kids have a few basic formulas. The most common of this is a kid or small group of kids (or alternatively something kid-like) who are misfits from their society who then discover something important and through a variety of trials end up changing their society. Done well, you get Ratatouille. Done less well, you get A Bug’s Life. Really, the formula itself is set; the quality of the movie comes almost exclusively from how well the elements are created and meshed together. Tack on a good story and smart performances, and you might have something great. This is the formula for How to Train Your Dragon, meaning that the question that needs to be answered isn’t specifically how the story will turn out, but how good is the journey to that ending.

I’m going to start with my complaints because I really want to spend the bulk of this talking about just how much this film gets right. In the complaint department, I have only one real thing to talk about: the characters’ accents. How to Train Your Dragon takes place in a Viking village. Who decided that Vikings should sound like they’re from Scotland? If we’re looking for some cultural touchstone, they should sound closer to the Swedish Chef. I suppose that no one would take them seriously if they were running around saying, “Hingy dingy horsky dorp dorp dorp,” but that’s not an excuse to have them sound like a gang of Glaswegians. And beyond that, it’s the adults who sound like they should be wearing kilts; the kids all sound like they’re from Iowa.

Lilo & Stitch

Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

People talk about the Disney renaissance as starting with Tangled or with Frozen. Nobody mentions Lilo & Stitch despite its solid reviews, direct-to-video sequel and television series. This is a Disney film I missed, and if I’m honest about it, it’s one that I didn’t really relish watching tonight. I’ll put this as nicely as I can: I hate the art. I don’t mean that I dislike that it’s different than the traditional Disney style. I mean that I think it’s weird looking and kind of ugly. I find it vaguely disturbing that Lilo apparently doesn’t have teeth. Everyone is oddly blocky and bulbous. It bothers me on an aesthetic level. Regardless of whether I like the story or not, Lilo & Stitch starts with a large strike against it.

We start at a galactic council where a scientist named Jumba Jookiba (voiced by David Ogden Stiers using a thick Russian accent) is on trial for illegal genetic experimentation. He has created something he calls Experiment 626, which we’ll soon be calling Stitch (Chris Sanders). 626 has been designed to be wholly and completely destructive. The experiment is slated for marooning on an asteroid, but naturally escapes, steals a police cruiser and hyperspaces to Earth. He crash lands on Kauai. Jookiba and Earth “expert” Pleakley (Kevin McDonald) are sent to recover 626 so that he doesn’t destroy the planet, which has been labelled a wildlife preserve as a way to protect the galaxy’s endangered mosquito population.