Tears For Fears: ¡Ay, Mis Hijos!

Welcome back to my Tears for Fears marathon, where I will be covering every movie featuring the Mexican folk legend La Llorona in anticipation of her newest movie in April...

Year: 2011

Director: Alberto Rodriguez

Cast: Andrés Couturier, Mónica Del Carmen, Rafael Inclán

Run Time: 1 hour 15 minutes

This marathon has run us through every subgenre of horror possible (and will continue to do so until the bitter end), but I certainly can say that the one I never expected to be covering was children's animation. Well it turns out the creepy campfire story instincts that led to projects like Goosebumps or Are You Afraid of the Dark? being produced for children aren't isolated to the Anglophone world. Las Leyendas (Legends) is a massively popular Mexican animated film series, where children face off against all kinds of legendary monsters, including El Chupacabra, El Charro Negro, the Mummies of Guanajuato, and... you guessed it. 

Surprise! It's La Llorona!

La Leyenda de la Llorona is the second film in the franchise after it debuted with La Leyenda de la Nahuala in 2007. I was worried I might be missing some vital context for the story of the franchise, but luckily these stories are definitely standalone. As long as you're willing to accept without question the fact that our young hero Andres (Andrés Couturier) flies around in a hot air balloon with two skeleton kids, the ghost of an ancient knight, and a dragon named Alebrije (Rafael Inclán). Easy peasy.

Set in the 18th century in the indigenous region of Xochimilco, this is the story of a town besieged by La Llorona, who has been kidnapping children left and right, as she tends to do. Andres is separated from his party, who must battle their way through the horrors of an island of living puppets while he teams up with local irritating child Kika (Mónica Del Carmen), who wants to rescue her brother from La Llorona's clutches.

And though she shares a name with an Almodóvar film, she does not share its gravitas or grace. Or volume.

This film hails from the grand tradition of the Tim Burtons and Scooby Doos of yesteryear, and it's certainly a worthy entry in the creepy animation genre. And while we're at it, this is absolutely one of the scarier cinematic Lloronas out there (and while I've seen a great many of them this year, I can say the bell curve on actual horror has been low). 

They do pull a major punch on her backstory, saying that her kids died in an accident when she wasn't watching them rather than having her drown them, but they're still dead is the thing, so at least there's still a bit of an edge here. And the way she wails, drifting down empty moonlit streets is ethereal and strange, helped along quite a bit by the medium of animation that allows her to actually seem ghostly and inhuman rather than some P.A. in a fright wig. And the subplot here is even scarier, because creepy puppets never ever fail.

And speaking of the animation itself, it's... while I wouldn't say beautiful, it's certainly interesting. The backgrounds - especially the buildings in town - are rendered with 3D computer animation, while the characters interacting them are more classically 2D and cartoonish. It's a curious juxtaposition that does draw the eye, and the character designs are pleasantly round and surreal; the adult women in particular are drawn with elegant curving lines and detailed textures that are entirely appealing.

And then there's whatever this is. 

All that said, Leyenda is very kiddy. That's certainly not a design flaw, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing. I just don't count myself within the demographic for whom fart/pee/booger jokes can sustain an entire feature film, even one that's barely scraping 80 minutes. There is a false scare built around a pun on La Llorona's catch phrase "Ay, mis hijos" that was satisfying after watching a dozen of these things, and a joke involving a mariachi boat interrupting a quiet contemplative moment that both got me, but all in all I was unmoved. Much in the same way that my adult digestive system is no longer appreciative to me downing a bag of Fun Dip, La Leyenda de La Llorona is not appealing to my film palate, but certainly could have been back in the day.

In terms of movies specifically geared for young children (and I mean young), you could hardly go wrong here. It's probably not convenient for anyone reading this that the movie is currently only streaming in Spanish with English subtitles, because a child old enough to have the patience and reading comprehension for this has probably already aged too far past its interest bracket, but hey! There are kids everywhere who do speak Spanish and they've been given quite a treat here. 

TL;DR: La Leyenda de la Llorona is definitely a fine film I would recommend to children, but not one that really speaks to me.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 841

Neither Hair Nor There

Year: 2016

Director:Walt Dohrn & Mike Mitchell

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Justin Timberlake, Zooey Deschanel

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The Troll dolls are a terrible concept for a movie. They haven’t been relevant for eons, there’s no inherent narrative to their existence, and any film about them could only be a crass cash-in. Then again, that’s what they said about The Lego Movie, and look how that turned out. Then again again, that’s what they said about Smurfs and look how that turned out. Case-by-case basis it is, then. Let’s do this thing.

For the record, Sergio dragged me to see this. It was not my choice.

In Trolls, the Trolls are a happy-go-lucky race hiding from the Bergens, ravenous giants who believe that the only way to achieve happiness is by eating Trolls. Look at how many times I had to say “Trolls” just in that sentence. This is gonna be a bumpy ride.

To make a long story short, bubbly Troll Princess Poppy (Anna Kendrick) throws a raucous party that attracts the attention of an outcast Bergen chef (Christine Baranski) who captures a handful of Trolls that she hopes to use on the adolescent King Gristle (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to take over the crown somehow. Poppy must team up with the pessimistic survivalist Troll Branch (Justin Timberlake) to travel across the forest to Bergen town and save her friends, maybe learning a thing or two about true happiness along the way.

Like kids need lessons on being giddy buffoons with no sense of personal space.

Trolls is everything wrong with Dreamworks animation. It’s packed with a billion characters designed to both sell dolls and shoehorn in cameos from celebrities you forgot existed (cough cough, Russell Brand), at the expense of defining any side-Troll’s personality beyond maybe half a character trait, if they’re lucky. It closes on a  big ol’ dance party that, like Home before it did for Rihanna, implies that Justin Timberlake music has the power to heal the universe. And it carries a lethal dose of juvenile, scatological humor. There’s literally a character whose only function is to fart glitter. And I don’t know why all kids’ movies in the past decade have decided that people spontaneously poop when they’re scared, but I’ve been sitting through these jokes since at least 2007 (AKA the worst scene in Enchanted), and let me clue you in on a little secret: They’re not getting any funnier.

But here’s the thing. Trolls does all this, yet it’s still inexplicably kind of delightful. There’s nothing new under the fuzzy yellow sun to be found in this story, but the movie succeeds on sheer charm, led by two of the most likeable actors we have on tap these days. Anna Kendrick embodies the usually irritating archetype of the chipper, naïve character (which was last successful some four years ago in Wreck-It Ralph) with a layer of soft humanity that makes her an actual character rather than a pest, and Justin Timberlake Odd Couples the sh*t out of her, developing an easy, warm chemistry between the mismatched characters.

You can tell the side performers are having fun too. Although not a single one of the assorted B-Trolls leaves any kind of impression, save for a deliciously creepy baby that steals each of her two scenes, Zooey Deschanel works it as the phlegmatic Bergen scullery maid, crafting a character that for once isn’t a Dreamy Lollipop Girl. And Christine Baranski is pure, syrupy evil, building a campy pantomime character out of a villain she is well aware doesn’t make much sense.

Look, she was in Mamma Mia! She could do this with her hands tied behind her back.

Trolls also boasts an overarching aesthetic that – while not totally mind-blowing – at least shows that people were trying, every step of the way. There’s a lot of fun business with the Trolls’ hair, using it as a malleable camouflage device to create all kinds of bizarre shapes and structures around the characters, some of which are incredibly inventive. And miraculously, they only make one terrible “hair” pun.

Pretty much everything is just a step or two above generic, but that’s all enough to make it one of the better children’s films out there at the moment. Take the soundtrack, a typically inane mixture of the world’s most obvious pop standards (“Celebrate” by Kool & the Gang, “September” by Earth, Wind, and Fire…. It’s like they found a list of the most overused movie tracks, accidentally clicked “purchase,” and decided to roll with it) and generic bubblegum originals, but it inexplicably works.

Some tracks, like a cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” benefit from Kendrick Pitch Perfecting it up and producing a quite lovely new arrangement. Others, like Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” are supported by a strong vocal actor (Zooey Deschanel in this case) working with the trippy designs to make something vibrant and idiosyncratic. And then there’s Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors,” pulled out in a moment of need, which briefly transforms the movie into a subdued, beautiful light show in the indisputable best moment of the film.

The originals fare just as well, hitting typical musical theater beats with gusto. Kendrick’s “Get Back Up Again” is the best girl power pop track in a year that’s riddled with them, buoyed by Kendrick’s unrelenting energy. And Bergentown is introduced with an amusingly dour number that’s part The Producers’ “Unhappy,” part Little Shop of Horrors’ “Skid Row,” all deliciously overwrought misery.

It’s just plain fun, and while the humor is mostly forgettable (they trot out “YOLO” a flat two years too late for a regretful gag), each of the cast members is given the chance to nail a line or two. If you have kids or an affinity for animated cinema, you could certainly do worse. It’s certainly better than the aforementioned Home and this year’s The Secret Life of Pets.

TL;DR: Trolls is a surprisingly decent, harmless family film.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1000

We Tell The Story

Year: 2016

Director: Travis Knight

Cast: Charlize Theron, Art Parkinson, Matthew McConaughey

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

I didn’t want to see Kubo and the Two Strings. Its trailers looked esoteric and incomprehensible, and nothing grabbed me. Luckily, I had a Sergio by my side, who always seems to have the exact opposite opinion about movie trailers. For once, he was right.

The fourth film by stop motion studio Laika (which debuted in 2009 with Coraline), Kubo and the Two Strings is a curious beast. It’s a Frankensteinian creation that grafts together half a dozen different family film genres into a lumbering, frequently clumsy monstrosity. And just like Frankenstein’s Monster before it, it might leave a trail of wreckage in its wake, but it snags your sympathies nonetheless.

Box office, bad.

In Kubo and the Two Strings, Kubo (Art Parkinson) lives in a remote village with his comatose mother, who only comes to life at night to tell him stories and remind him to always hide from the night sky, lest her sisters (both played by Rooney Mara) find him and pluck out his other eye. Oh yeah. Kubo is a descendant of the Moon King (Ralph Fiennes), an immortal denizen of the sky who looks coldly down on humanity with blind eyes. Also, he stole one of Kubo’s eyes because this is a fairy tale and fairy tales are f**ked up.

Anyway, Kubo makes a living using his innate magical powers to animate origami figures with his guitar, using them to tell stories of heroic adventure to the townspeople, but he always has trouble coming up with endings. After attempting to contact his dead father on a spiritual holiday, he accidentally stays out too late and must escape the clutches of his pursuing aunts. His companions are Monkey (Charlize Theron), a protective totem given life as his mother’s final act, an origami samurai, and Beetle (Matthew McConaughey), an amnesiac samurai who served under Kubo’s father and has been cursed with an insect body. They must find three pieces of armor that will allow Kubo to face off against the Moon King.

You know, quest stuff.

And that’s the short version of the plot. For most of the first act, Kubo doesn’t immediately explain what’s going on, plunging the viewer into the world and allowing them to learn the details as the story goes on. This feels like a fun, interactive storytelling style until it doesn’t. It keeps on going, right on into the second and third acts, revealing that it probably wasn’t an intentional choice, just a symptom of the irreparable damage that has been done to this script.

Kubo clumsily attempts to blend a grand quest storyline with categorically juvenile comedy setups, and a feint toward Pixarian heartstring plucking, but the cartilage linking these pieces together is severely eroded. Kubo’s powers flourish and fade according to totally inexplicable rhythms that are nowhere to be found in the actual story. The screenplay attempts to wring out two facile Grand Twists that it doesn’t notice are the exact same as each other, and which could easily be predicted by even the toddlers in the audience if the story was actually comprehensible. And the third act is utter nonsense, bringing the script’s didactic tendency to cudgel us over the head with its themes to the forefront for a wholly unsatisfying boss battle. Or maybe it’s a clever tie-in to the fact that Kubo can never finish his stories. Either way, it sucks. But in spit of all this, Kubo is still kind of great.

Look, our other option this year is Ice Age 5. We takes what we gets.

Although the film stumbles through the smoking wreckage of its narrative, nearly everything in the moment works spectacularly well. It helps to ignore the big picture, but look: This is a movie for kids, who I daresay possess that skillset in spades. 

First off, let me qualify my statement about that juvenile humor. That’s not a detraction, merely an observation that this is a family film of the purest variety, with squeaky clean wholesome material that doesn’t give into the “one for the kids, one for the adults” impulse of almost all post-Shrek animated films. It’s actually quite amusing, and it’s fun to see Charlize Theron converting her badass persona honed in Mad Max into a razor-sharp ‘straight-man” role. And Matthew McConaughey lets off some of that hyper-serious Free State of Jones steam with a  light, breezy vocal performance that reminds us he’s actually capable of nailing comedy.

But what Kubo and the Two Strings boasts above anything else is truly exquisite stop-motion. Next to Pixar’s short film “Piper,” it’s the best animation of the year (not that Sausage Party provided tremendous competition), rendering scenes so gorgeous you just have to sit there, mouth agape, as they wash over you. I’m thinking particularly about the water animation, which is impossibly precise and fluid, pushing the boundaries of what the medium is capable of. They also lean toward their darker impulses, sprinkling in healthy doses of nightmare fuel with the blank porcelain design of the Moon Sisters and a delightfully creepy skeleton monster. The only dark spot on the film is the rendering of the old woman Kameyo (Brenda Vaccaro), which seems to have been imported from some student film. And not even a senior student.

And then, like, there’s emotions and stuff. I’m not convinced Kubo comes by its teary dramatics honestly, but I was openly weeping for about 50% of it, so maybe I was just in a mood. Really, at the end of the day, Kubo is a fun, stylish (that living origami concept is rockin’) family adventure and while it’s a bit muddled, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

TL;DR: Kubo and the Two Strings is a deliriously haphazard narrative, but it makes up for it with exquisite animation and genuine humor.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 990

Cleanup On Aisle 69

Year: 2016

Director: Greg Tiernan & Conrad Vernon

Cast: Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Michael Cera

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I can take or leave Seth Rogen. When he’s doing Neighbors or plying himself in The Comeback, I’m all in. When he’s working with Judd Apatow, I’m 50/50. I’ve never disliked a performance of his, nor have I been utterly enamored of one. But when it comes down to his producing and writing choices, I can’t deny that he’s hit his stride. While I haven’t adored every movie in his recent string of films (This is the End, The Interview, Neighbors 2), he’s unafraid of being conceptually audacious, and I have heaps of respect for that.

Which brings us to the latest entry in his oeuvre: Sausage Party, an R-rated twist on the Pixar ethos. While he comedy’s juvenile at best, the script has no right to be as thematically sharp and satirical as it is. He can put one more notch in his belt because, no paper, this one’s another win.

Butcher paper, that is.

In Sausage Party, the food in the grocery store is sentient, and all they want is to be taken home to the Great Beyond by us, the Gods. They believe we will grant them an eternity of happiness and sensual pleasure. However, when Honey Mustard (Danny McBride) is returned by a customer having become a shuddering wreck, hot dog Frank (Seth Rogen) begins to have doubts about the Great Beyond. His antics cause him and his devout bun girlfriend Brenda (Kristen Wiig) to fall out of their cart, forced to find their home aisle before they lose their freshness.

Brenda wants her journey to lead her home, and Frank wants his journey to lead to the truth. They’re joined by Kareem Abdul Lavash (David Krumholtz) and Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton), two walking stereotypes that act out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for some godforsaken reason. Also there’s Barry (Michael Cera), a stunted hot dog who has seen the truth about the Great Beyond – that kitchens are essentially less-fun Jigsaw traps for groceries – and struggles to return to the store to warn his friend. Oh, and a douchey Douche (Nick Kroll) wants to destroy Frank and Brenda for accidentally bending his nozzle.

I don’t know whether it’s the fault of the middling-at-best, horrifyingly-inelegant-at-worst animation or my blissful ignorance, but I definitely thought he was a toilet brush for like 15 minutes.

Do you think cartoon characters cussing is the funniest thing in the world? Then you should just pre-order your special edition quadruple disc Blu-Ray now, because you are going to love the s**t out of Sausage Party. As expected, the film has one foot firmly plated in the sophomoric at all times, but it’s the other foot that’s going interesting places.

This whole script is a feature-length allegory about the creation of religion, the horrible things it makes people to to one another and themselves, and why we shouldn’t be so quick to cast judgment on people who subscribes to different belief systems than us. Also, the moral is that raging hedonism is our only defense against our inevitable mortality, so it’s pretty much like Toy Story 3. I know, right? You got your subtext all over my R-rated comedy! How did this get in here? It’s an incredibly clever story that has heck-all to do with naughty hijinks, but whatever. I’m there.

It’s to the point that I can actually see somebody’s life philosophy changing to some degree after a screening of Sausage Party. As alarming as that sounds, that honestly might just be a good thing. I’m physically upset by how deeply I respect the intellectual cogs spinning behind the movie’s colorful cartoon façade. And then, of course, the rest of the movie is mostly super racist.

Thanks, everybody. I was getting too deep into liking this movie.

Not only is the humor desperately crude, which I’m fine with, it gives in to its urge to pattern every ethnic food after the most revolting racial stereotypes that can be produced by a screenwriting cabal of white dudes. Shock humor is all well and god, and the film does manage to convert the hideously insensitive Lavash and Bagel arc into something sweet and then appropriately twisted, however most of the racial humor is not only distasteful, but kind of lazy.

It doesn’t take more than a teaspoon of thought to make Grits (Craig Robinson) an angry black stereotype or to name your Native American liquor character (Bill Hader, why) firewater. So it’s pointless as well as disrespectful. This is humor that’s older than anyone reading this, and it’s certainly not funny today, if it ever was to begin with.

I’m terribly sorry to have such bad news to report about that aspect of the humor, because a lot of Sausage Party is really fun. When it goes whole hog depicting violence or sexuality, the film is at its best, and I’m not just saying this as a horror fan. Watching a film so gleefully unafraid to push the envelope of Hollywood sensibilities is a massively liberating experience. It’s certainly not for everyone, but as a cartoon about food, it’s enough degrees separated form human experience that even non-gorehounds should be able to get a kick out of it.

So much of Sausage Party is fun and intelligent and so much of it is crass and low-rent that it’s difficult to synthesize a proper score for the monstrosity. What I’ll say is this: Go see t if you have a high threshold for fratty, tasteless comedy. If you don’t, who cares. Have a nice day.

TL;DR: Sausage Party is mostly irreverent, weirdly intelligent fun despite its unfortunately prevalent racism.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 962

Chew Toy Story

Year: 2016

Director: Yarrow Cheney & Chris Renaud

Cast: Louis C.K., Eric Stonestreet, Kevin Hart

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

I have a tenuous relationship with Illumination Entertainment. While I’m down to clown with some Minion mayhem from time to time, I’ve only truly liked one of their movies so far: Despicable Me. Its sequel would have joined the list were it not for the blatant racism and obsessive heteronormativity. And you couldn’t have paid me to go see Hop or The Lorax. I want to like this studio, I really do. I’m ready to see it thrive.

You see, there’s a sea change coming, and this will put Illumination on a path either to greatness or to ruin. We’re living in a post-Minions world. After the Despicable Me spinoff raked in over one billion dollars (that’s far from an exaggeration), these little yellow ragamuffins have become a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Illumination recognizes that they are sitting on what could be this generation’s Mickey Mouse, so they’re lassoing that bronco and seeing how far they can ride it. The Minions now inform the look and feel of the company’s entire output (including their studio logo, which highlights the “MIN  ION” in the company name), even appearing in a comic short preceding Illumination’s latest box office bulldozer, The Secret Life of Pets.

That’s the movie we’re here to talk about, and we shall. In one minute. The commitment to Minion style comedy and animation will make Illumination’s output a more coherent whole, which is definitely a good thing. But there’s an extremely high chance of them flying too close to the sun. What I’m seeing with Pets makes me extremely nervous. But only time will tell.

They’re already used up five of their nine lives, so they’ve got to be careful.

In The Secret Life of Pets, something in your home can secretly speak when you’re not looking! How novel! Those things in particular are pets, and our lead pet is Max (kid favorite Louis C. K.), a dog owned by Katie (Ellie Kemper). When Katie gets a second dog, the enormous mutt Duke (Eric Stonestreet), Max’s jealousy leads them into a fight while on a walk, which gets them captured by animal control. They embark on a long, arduous journey to get home, meeting a tribe of abandoned pets led by the sadistic bunny Snowball (Kevin Hart, who I’m pretty sure is contractually obligated to be in every movie ever made). Meanwhile, a rescue attempt is led by Gidget (Jenny Slate), a neighbor dog with a massive crush on Max.

Will our unlikely pair make it home, having discovered a newfound friendship along the way?!

What the f**k do YOU think?

The Secret Life of Pets relies entirely on one major human personality trait that I lack entirely: an affinity for the animal kingdom. If you’re what is colloquially known as a “dog person,” this movie will magnetically draw your attention and admiration. But it’s the Dane Cook of pet-based movies, observing animal behavior without finding anything to say about it. There could be a very interesting comedy here about how pets operate in a world that wasn’t built for them, but the screenplay seems content to relax in the “dogs sure do love to walk in circles before they lie down, don’t they?” register. This is a movie that required four distinct people to write it, and Lord knows what they did all day. It doesn’t require a Jane Goodall level of research to reach the conclusion that cats like to chase laser dots.

Then again, this movie is lazy in every way, shape, and form, including some ways, shapes, and forms that haven’t even been invented yet. Combining the premise of Toy Story with the plot of Homeward Bound and the characters of Flushed Away, this is a movie that could only have been marketed to children, because anyone over the age of six has already seen it a thousand times before. I understand that I am not in the major demographic for this film, and that’s fine. But if you’re looking for an animated animal movie with a lazy premise, why not go straight to the source and watch Finding Dory again? Don’t waste you or your child’s time with this unbecoming nonentity.

Come to think of it, does anybody with a kid actually read my blog, besides my parents? Hello out there!

I think I laughed twice at The Secret Life of Pets, which is honestly more than I expected, so kudos to them. Kevin Hart’s presence is such a massive roadblock to my personal sense of humor that I’m genuinely delighted I had any fun at all. 

This flick is all over the place, frantically darting down every avenue of comedy it can. The roster includes poop jokes, a pratfall interlude that slams the brakes on the plot so abruptly that you’re tossed from your seat, and deeply weird cribs  from classic films as varied as Grease, The Lost World, and freaking Some Like It Hot. So I was bound to like something in this schizophrenic fantasia of comedy stylings. Pets also carries out the Minions manifesto of being inexplicably violent for a kids’ movie, trotting out some incredibly unkind slapstick and even literally killing off a character in pursuit of a gag.

There’s a surprising amount of death coursing around the edges of this film, but it’s not treated in the gloopy tragic mien of Pixar. In fact, it’s barely acknowledged at all, because Pets ignores the arcs of nearly every major character in its feverish race toward the finish line. It’s such a cursory, tossed-off product trafficking in only the hoariest cof lichés that it’s vaguely insulting.

So… Welcome back, Illumination! Maybe stick to Minion movies. The Secret Life of Pets is exactly what happens when the sugar rush sophomoric humor of the Minions is undiluted by other tones, then stripped of the retro, stylistic sheen that has always surrounded them. It ain’t pretty, it ain’t memorable, it ain’t anything. I hope and pray that another Despicable Me is right around the corner, because the new age of Illumination is looking unpromisingly like the old age.

TL;DR: The Secret Life of Pets is a boring, lazy movie without much drive.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1054

Just Keep Swimming

Year: 2016

Director: Andrew Stanton & Angus MacLane

Cast: Ellen DeGeneres, Albert Brooks, Ed O'Neill

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

So, Pixar. Not something that has been talked about frequently on Popcorn Culture despite its prominence in the blogger’s childhood. Let’s get into it, shall we? The groundbreaking studio that combines digital animation with humor and heart has been in a very weird creative space lately. As every animation studio and their mother have hopped on the computer-generated train (including Pixar’s literal parent, the Disney company), Pixar has been having a harder and harder time keeping their heads above the creative water.

Obviously, with films like Up and Toy Story 3 in their recent repertoire, Pixar hasn’t exactly fallen behind the curve, but for every glittering gem they produce they’ve also been bogged down by patently anonymous entries like Brave and (god help us) The Good Dinosaur, or lesser franchise fare like Cars 2 or Monsters University. Their most recent feature Inside Out has definitely boosted their credibility once more (seriously, let’s just pretend The Good Dinosaur doesn’t exist – it’s easy because I guarantee you haven’t seen it), but in the buildup to Finding Dory it was hard not to be a little nervous.

A thirteen-years-later sequel to one of their most beloved films that also acts as a  spin-off about an endearing sidekick with a one-note personality? That’s like mixing a bowl of plastic explosives using a stick of dynamite. It’s a recipe for disaster. But here we are. It has arrived. It’s in theaters, ripping through the box office like a money-devouring golem. So… How is it?

You’ll find out after this word from our sponsors.

In Finding Dory, Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) is a blue tang suffering from short-term memory loss. After helping the clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) find his son Nemo (Hayden Rolence, replacing the original actor, who is like 80 years old by this point), memories begin to surface of her own parents (Diane Keaton & Eugene Levy, who at this point has been an onscreen father to pretty much every living actor). She sets out to find them, but her slippery memory provides a mounting challenge. She, Marlin, and Nemo end up at a marine research institute, a  rehabilitation center/aquarium where Dory was born. The adventure might not be as large-scale as the cross-country trek of Finding Nemo, but travelling between he exhibits is tougher than it sounds when you’re just a lil fish with a spotty memory.

When Dory and the clownfish get separated, she must rely on new and old friends like Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), a nearsighted whale shark, Hank (Ed O’Neill), a grumpy octopus, and – eventually – herself.

There might be other fish in the sea, but none of them are quite like Dory.

As with any review of a Pixar feature, we must begin with a slight interruption to discuss The Short. This short in particular, “Piper,” is such a vast improvement upon last year’s treacly mess “Lava” that just the first frame is enough to bring tears to one’s eyes. Set at a beach, where a baby sand piper is learning how to hunt for food while facing its fear of the ocean, it’s a stunning piece of work. The story is lean, simple, and charming, but the animation is the true standout, an unparalleled achievement in photorealistic digital imaging that consigns all competitors into oblivion. The ocean… The feathering on the birds… The sand! Oh, I could rhapsodize about that perfectly replicated sand for hours. It’s a beautiful piece, capturing the look and feel of reality while delicately blending it with the rounded edges and welcoming cuteness of a cartoon. It’s brilliant and I won’t hear a word against it.

Now, about that pesky movie it’s attached to. Honestly, it’s pretty good. Pixar isn’t knocking on the door of a second Golden Age, but they’re at least not coasting anymore. Finding Dory is playing in the shallows, but it’s having a lot of fun. With its small-scale setting comes small-scale themes (plenty of family movie standbys: the power of friendship and/or family, believing in oneself, all that good stuff) and small-scale characters (the only new character given any depth whatsoever is the surly Hank, who is welded onto an Odd Couple arc older than cinema itself), but it’s still bursting with energy like a 5-year-old who figured out the child locks on the Oreo cupboard.

Perhaps the most significant thing about Finding Dory is that it’s practically immune to sequelitis. Although there are a handful of intensely pandering moments (we get an origin story for the “Just Keep Swimming” song, which is about as patently useless as finding out how Professor X went bald), this movie isn’t just a Finding Nemo greatest hits collection. Returning characters are integrated fairly well into the new story in places where they organically belong. OK, a cameo by the surfer turtles is a little unpleasant, but justified. And the movie never really figures out what to do with Marlin and Nemo until the third act. But we’re thankfully not forced through a gauntlet of grotesqueries, with doppelgänger scenes visiting the vegetarian sharks, the aquarium escapees, the dentist’s daughter, and so on. Finding Dory is well aware of its history and its universe, but it rarely feels the need to repeat itself.

Which is ironic, considering that’s pretty much Dory’s M.O.

So much of Finding Dory is new, and while none of it is quite on the level of the original plot and characters, could it ever be? The new side characters here are bright and fun even if they’re not so engaging, and a pair of lounging sea lions are an excellent substitute for the much-beloved seagulls. And everything that isn’t new is classic Pixar, which ain’t a bad place to be. There’s plenty of humor derived from the anthropomorphic nature of our inhuman leads, depicting in increasingly wacky ways how one might reasonably travel through the various sectors of an aquarium when one isn’t exactly inclined to breathing air.

And then of course, there’s the obligatory part that takes a machete to the heartstrings. The emotional moments in the climax feel a wee bit rote, but any time you’re treated to a flashback of young Dory with her parents, you’re going to wish you had gills, because otherwise you’re going to down in saltwater tears. Baby Dory is so devastatingly adorable and her separation from her parents is so straight-up brutal that the combined cuteness and sadness will overload our system.

I’m pretty sure renting your kid a Pixar movie qualifies as child abuse.

All in all, it’s a cleverly organized, silly movie about overcoming your disabilities and discovering your inner strength. The title Finding Dory isn’t just a franchise tie-in it’s a thematic manifesto. Whether or not it’s a truly great Pixar movie is beside the point. It’s a very good one, and we should be happy it’s around.

TL;DR: Finding Dory is a fun, energetic sequel that stays true to its story even if it's dealing with shallower material than its predecessor.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1190

Born To Be Wild

Year: 2016

Director: Byron Howard, Rich Moore, & Jared Bush

Cast: Ginnifer Goodwin, Jason Bateman, Idris Elba 

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Friends, furries, countrymen… Lend me your ears. On my third anniversary with a certain Disneyphile, I had occasion to attend the opening night of Zootopia, the newest film from Disney Animation’s CGI wing (which, let’s face it, is not as good, but Wreck-It Ralph, Tangled, and Big Hero 6 soften the blow). Frankly, I was not sold by the deeply unimpressive trailer, which frontloaded a sloth gag as old and creaky as Gandalf’s knees, and the improbably high Rotten Tomatoes score only served to make me more suspicious. However, I am pleased to announce that I come bearing good news! But first… the plot.

AKA: The part in between the constantly replaying Shakira song.

In Zootopia, animals have evolved past their savage, wild ways. Predators and prey now live in harmony, doing all the fun things that people do, like taxes and Tinder and eating ice cream, only furrier. Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) is a small town bunny with a dream, to serve and protect the citizens of the bustling metropolis Zootopia as a member of the police force. The first bunny on the force, she doesn’t fit in with her burly, aggressive coworkers and gets stuck on parking detail. Overeager to pursue justice rather than follow orders, she ends up on the bad side of Chief Bogo (Idris Elba), who gives her 48 hours to solve a missing mammal case, or else her badge is revoked.

Her unlikely partner in this endeavor is the con-man (or rather, con-fox) Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), at which point Zootopia promptly becomes, against all odds, a buddy cop movie. In the process of their investigation, Nick and Judy discover a vast and dangerous conspiracy that will challenge everything they know about the world… and themselves.

AKA: The people who aren’t Shakira.

If you have seen any amount of promo for Zootopia, you might assume (reasonably) that the film is some sort of animated sloth delivery system, but you would be wrong. As hard as they’re pushing those side characters to sell sloth plushies, the bulk of the movie is blissfully free of their musty antics (why they’ve zeroed in on the sloth when a blissed-out yak and a heart-meltingly adorable fennec fox have more, and stronger, screen time is beyond me, but I guess I should pull an Elsa and let it go). What the trailers completely fail to communicate is that Zootopia is an ingeniously crafted modern fable that takes the form of a hardboiled mystery procedural, something I feel was pretty vital to mention. But alas, this is not a review of the Disney publicity department, so let’s move on.

You guys know I love me some world-building, and Zootopia has it in spades. There is one intractable conceptual problem, in that the anthropomorphic citizenry frequently refer to themselves being animals to excuse certain behaviors. However, in a world with no humans, the concept of an “animal” as a wild or uncivilized creature couldn’t exist. That is, unless Zootopia takes place on a post-human extinction Earth, Planet of the Apes style. But I digress. Wildly.

When you’re presented with the concept “animals doing people things,” it’s pretty easy to come up with a half dozen gags off the top of your head. It’s a gimme concept. However, I’m delighted to report that the filmmakers were far from lazy when constructing their animal utopia. In addition to a series of clever but typical gags about animal behavior (wolves love to howl, lemmings have a tendency to be followers, goddamn sloths are slow), Zootopia really digs into a fresh concept: What are the implications of a society composed of hundreds of different animal species? What habitats would they need? What municipal structures would be necessary to foster inter-species cooperation?

Zootopia has its most fun when it is exploring these concepts through delirious visual gags and gorgeous city structures, fostered by the feverishly creative, lush environs courtesy of production designers David Goetz and Dan Cooper. It’s a well thought-out universe, the result of meticulous study, and an excellent breeding ground for the film’s Big Ol’ Message. Zootopia has a strong moral, an appropriately modern treatise/racial allegory about diversity, cooperation, and prejudice that would be obnoxiously preachy in any other movie. However, it is so organically developed through characters and their environments that it becomes even stronger for it, as intrinsic and natural to the film’s universe as fluffy bunnies.

It’s also, like, and important message or whatever, but world-building, you guys.

It really is a fun time at the movies, consistently enjoyable for children and adults alike. I always respect family entertainment that has a brain in its head, and Zootopia is a very sharp, deliberate film with a real sense of purpose. It’s a creative mix of seemingly disparate genres, a wacky yet sometimes dangerous romp with actual stakes, and it teaches you not to be so rude to parking enforcers. It’s a win-win-win!

That said, the tsunami of critical adoration this film ha been receiving is bonkers. It’s a solid, sweet family film, but not even The Shawshank Redemption has a 99 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. For all its genuine quality, it’s still a new age animated movie, with all the inane pop culture references and slyly inappropriate “for the parents” jokes that that entails. These moments are of a slightly higher caliber than your typical kids fodder, but Zootopia isn’t free from those pitfalls.

I would give the film an unqualified recommendation to anybody with two eyes and heart, but it isn’t the second coming of Pixar. Not that a movie need to be that in order to be pretty damn remarkable.

TL;DR: Zootopia is a fun, smart exercise in children's filmmaking with a solid, ironically human message.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 985

Brown Is The New Black

Year: 2015

Director: Steve Martino

Cast: Noah Schnapp, Bill Melendez, Hadley Belle Miller

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: G

To put it bluntly, I can’t stand the comic strip Peanuts. Its nostalgic monotony and saccharine anti-humor are the Kryptonite to my Iron Man. It’s not even in the same universe as my sense of humor. Needless to say, I did not seek out this year’s The Peanuts Movie. Alas, it found me, thanks to a relationship of some 2 ½ years that I find a regrettable necessity to maintain. You can imagine my surprise when the film ended up being not quite so bad as all that.

You’re welcome. You can put down the torches and pitchforks. We wouldn’t want you straining your arms.

The Peanuts Movie tells the story of one Charlie Brown (Noah Schnapp). You may have heard of him. He lives in Anytown, USA with his sister Sally (Mariel Sheets), his dog Snoopy (Bill Melendez’s recording backlog), and their inexplicable small bird friend Woodstock (Bill Melendez, and isn’t it nice that two of culture’s most iconic characters were voiced by a Latino? Go history!). All of his friends – especially Lucy (Hadley Belle Miller) – think he’s a schlub, but when a certain Little Red-Haired Girl (Francesca Capaldi) moves to town, Charlie develops an instant crush, vowing to utilize his blank slate and impress her.

As he attempts to win her approval via various schemes that gang aft agley, he dashes his way through a collage of classic Peanuts moments that attempt to browbeat the audience into whimsical nostalgia. Look! There’s Schroeder (Noah Johnston) on his piano! A choir singing “Christmas Time Is Here” (which invariably reminds me of Arrested Development, probably much to the consternation of the Schultz estate)! And over there! It’s Peppermint Patty (Venus Schultheis) playing hockey with her assistant/lesbian love slave Marcie (Rebecca Bloom)!

And the make KIDS watch this stuff? Kinky.

Presumably they put those touches in for the grown-ups dragging their kids to see the film, because I don’t see a six-year-old waxing nostalgic for a property they were introduced to months before via Amazon Prime. But never fear! Along with being an alarmingly thorough, sometimes obsessively devoted Fatal Attraction-y recreation of the tried-and-true Peanuts tropes and characters, The Peanuts Movie is also a dazzlingly boilerplate children’s film sure to fail to offend all the families of this great nation.

Don’t let my suppurating sarcasm fool you, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you’re an adult looking for bracingly original entertainment, 1) What the hell are you doing here in the first place? And 2) this film just plain isn’t for you. It’s a charming, unchallenging 80-minute cartoon with more or less conflict-free hijinks and a deeply baked-in moral that can be sniffed out at a hundred yards. It’s as predictable as a calendar, but if you’re in the mood for a bit of colorful fluff, it does the trick.

However, though the narrative lacks complexity, the animation more than makes up for it. Although the spongy CGI technique that renders the characters takes some getting used to, the visual language of Peanuts is delightfully vivacious. Utilizing the unreality of cartoons in a much more satisfying way than most recent children’s films, The Peanuts Movie cleverly blends ancient tropes and modern, squeaky clean humor. 

The joy of embracing the anarchy and visual rule-breaking allowed by animation comes through in nearly every frame, whether it be a creative take on the split-screen telephone effect or giving weight and substance to a cloud of imaginary hearts. It’s a technique that will always keep you engaged, even when the story tastes like an infinitely familiar formula.

The best thing about writing for children is that they haven’t seen squat and thus have no idea when you’re recycling material.

This totally generic, occasionally sweet, aesthetically dashing flick mostly floats along harmlessly, though there are a couple shabby patches that leak out a little air from the piece as a whole. The most physically jarring of these are the all-too-frequent interludes into Snoopy’s jet fighter alter ego. I can’t speak for the rest of the Charlie Brown films, but here Snoopy is at best a tertiary comic relief character and his obligatory flights of fancy to thwart the Red Baron halt the momentum of the film like a bowling ball to the stomach. They pull focus from the actual narrative to a totally pointless action adventure (starring Kristin Chenoweth for some reason) that reads like a twelve-year-old’s dream journal. Sure, the G.I. Joe demographic might dig it, but who in their right mind brought them to see this movie?

The only other major complaint to be had (besides the fact that the Meghan Trainor song written for the movie plays three distinct times, which is at least two and a half too many) is that, in keeping with tradition, the Little Red-Haired Girl’s face is kept obscured. Until it isn’t. They abruptly show the character’s face about a third of the way through the movie with literally zero fanfare, in a side view with a wide shot, at which point they utterly cease any effort not to show her. This turn of events is actively confounding. It would be like Jaws having the shark nip out of the water for a quick ice cream cone in the background of a dialogue scene.

Both these issues do serious damage to the pace and tone of the film, but the classic framework the story is built on could weather any storm. The Peanuts Movie endures, providing a distraction for kids that is skilled enough to engaged the parents as well, at least at an aesthetic level. It’s family filmmaking at its most sweetly inconsequential.

TL;DR: The Peanuts Movie is harmless, sweet children's entertainment that displays an unusually creative visual style.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 979

Chartreuse Overkill

Year: 2015

Director: Pierre Coffin & Kyle Balda

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Jon Hamm, Pierre Coffin

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Two films came out this weekend. One was about an eternal, murderous presence laying ruin and waste upon all who come across it, and the other was The Gallows. I’m not kidding when I say that – of these two films – Minions left the most lasting emotional scars. Children’s films have a long history of embracing the macabre*, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a kiddie flick so grimly invested in depicting murder, torture, and mayhem.

It’s all tangential of course, like in the equally inexplicable Seinfeld insect massacre classic Bee Movie, but it’s quietly alarming all the same. And that’s but one facet of the massive, hyperactive, inert conglomerate that forms the sweaty, heaving, surreally self-deluded mass that is Minions, the spin-off of the Despicable Me franchise that focuses on its most marketable and least narratively viable characters: the thousands of tiny yellow sight gags that bumble around Gru’s villainous laboratory.

*I still have physical injuries from the tunnel scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Bello.

Minions tells the story of three Minions in particular, who set off in 1968 to find a villain to serve and thus save their tribe from extinction: Kevin (director Pierre Coffin), the headstrong leader, Stuart (director Pierre Coffin), the lazy musician, and Bob (renowned egotist Pierre Coffin), the obligatory Dumb One. Bob has a teddy bear named Tim who you will grow to love far more than any of the malign growths we shall henceforth call characters. Through a series of delightful (to someone, I’m sure) misadventures, these Three Minionteers end up in the service of the baddest villain in all the land: Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock), and her groovy, gadget-peddling husband Herb (Jon Hamm).

Scarlett enlists the Minions to help her steal the crown of the Queen of England because this films feints at empowering women include her sole motivation being “wanting to be a pretty princess.” Through a series of delightful (see above) escapades, the Minions end up accidentally overthrowing the monarchy. Scarlett hangs out in her lair while this is happening, because Sandra Bullock doesn’t come cheap. Beyond this, I’m at a loss to explain the plot because there really isn’t one.

Despite its surprising ingenuity in creating a scenario for this cash-in prequel that has potential and feels organic to the universe of Despicable Me, Minions has an astonishing lack of narrative drive. It’s like a building abandoned in the middle of construction. The framework is there, but the wind echoes hollowly through it.

Coincidentally, that's the title of my upcoming poetry collection.

It’s a curious thing. Show the opening scenes of Minions to any producer or screenwriter worth their cocaine and they could fill in the rest, giving you a generic but marketable movie: Kevin wants to save the tribe himself. Bob and Stuart accidentally save the tribe. Kevin learns to swallow his pride and value teamwork over fame and recognition. Bam. It’s treacly but its sells. 

And that’s clearly where Minions wants to go, but despite its obvious setup, it forgets its purpose, sloughs off any recognizable conflict or resolution, and sets its villain on a bungee cord of incomprehensibly shifting motivations, all in order to fit in a series of scatological gags, high-pitched jabbering, and heaps upon inexplicable heaps of nostalgia for a franchise that began a scant five years ago and has only had two films, only one of which was any good, all of which relies on an interminable series of jokes extrapolated from literally one line in the first film about bananas.

That would be like a Star Wars spin-off all about Wookies playing chess.

That said, Minions isn’t all bad. It’s shallow and childish, of course, but it’s family entertainment in 2015. We’re not exactly re-animating Walt Disney’s frozen head here. Relying heavily on the cultural touchstones and iconography of the 1960’s is a peculiar touch, considering that this film’s target audience was still in diapers when Britney was shaving her head, but it provides a quirky, groovy backdrop for some of the film’s silly humor.

Here’s the thing, though. The Minions were consistently the breakout stars of the previous two films, but - as we have constantly been failing to learn, seeing as we got a second season of Joey – giving a beloved side character an expanded role is an exercise in despair. Where the Minions were charming in small doses, here they are wan and overwrought, wrung out and exhausted of every last ounce of their potential. They still show glimmers of their previous buoyance, but are crushed by the sheer weight of the material they are called upon to perform.

Kind of like Britney, actually. Maybe that’s why they’re bald.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Despicable Me flick if it wasn’t trafficking in hideously distorted stereotypes! Nobody is safe from the broad scope and closed mind of the film. The British, of course, get a thorough dress-down, as is to be expected (nobody cares), but Minions also goes out of its way to mock the Indians, the elderly, and the gays before the credits roll, fret not. Before this franchise is buried in its tiny yellow grave, it’ll have achieved a blackout on its minority bingo card.

It’s a shambling disappointment to say the least, especially after the trailers made it look like maybe somebody tried even a little bit to make it palatable. The best thing I can say about the film is that it at least provides us a solid Jon Hamm performance, though he is forced to deliver lines across from Bullock who is phoning it in something fierce. Heck, she’s texting it in for everything but the lines they play in the trailer.

What I’m trying to say is that I like the Minions, the characters. I really do. But I did not like Minions, the film. I don’t suppose there is any reason on Earth that anybody with more than a single digit in their age should particularly want to go see this film anyway, but if you do, stop. Just watch Despicable Me again. Give Steve Carell your money, not this pile of squeaky toys masquerading as a film.

TL;DR: Minions is a spectacularly messy, plotless, if slightly charming kids' film.

Rating: 4/10
Should I Spend Money On This? No.
Word Count: 1078