Tag: animated

I had a creeping suspicion midway through Onward: there’s no reason this movie had to be set in a fantasy world, and the plot would have worked exactly as well in, say, the middle of Illinois. This is disappointing both as a regular Pixar attendee and an utter sucker for the fantastic, but it’s true; swap in a delay on the acceptance of magic and forget a handful of sight gags, and there’s nothing you’d really lose. I’m not saying this as a doctrinaire–obviously, the existence of centaurs and sprites and forgotten cantrips lets you get away with quite a bit, and I understand why they’re there. But aside from our central characters, their wizard staff, and their ½-resurrected dad, there’s almost nothing to marvel at. It doesn’t break the movie, a competent family road trip, but it’s emblematic of its larger problem: for all its talk of magic, Onward is thoroughly mundane. 

Tom Holland and Chris Pratt play Ian and Barley Lightfoot, a pair of elfin brothers in a fantasy world now wholly moved on from enchantments to electricity. Both brothers never really knew their father, who died when they were young, and on Ian’s 16th birthday their mother reveals his last gift: their father’s magic staff, along with a spell that will bring him back for 24 hours. But when Ian botches the spell and only brings back his father’s legs, the brothers set off to find another magic focus and cast it right before the clock runs out and their dad is gone for good. It should be apparent by this point that Pixar’s doing their usual thing and fishing for heartstrings, but if it sounds a little more crass than usual, that’s because it is. Much of the plots precedes like you’d expect it to–journeys of self-knowledge, empowerment, a comedy chase scene or two–but this time around, the artifice feels more transparent than usual. There’s little connective tissue between scenes, and character and plot arcs begin and conclude with alarming frequency; a dance number closes a game-changing rift, and one character moment is handled with an actual checklist of growth. The film’s main conceit, Ian learning how to cast spells, is not an uninteresting idea, but it’s done so ham-handedly it’s hard to get engaged (Barley quite literally yells that spells have to be cast from your “heart-fire” over and over again until we get what he’s saying by proxy). This feels, at least in part, because Onward doesn’t seem to know what it’s about. It shuffles its feet around “staying connected to your past,” “trust those you love,” and “believe in yourself,” and by the time it finally arrives at “the meaning of family” the movie’s almost done. 

I’m about to criticize this movie some more, so before that happens allow me to interrupt myself and say that Onward isn’t bad. It’s perfectly functional, and functional for Pixar, some of the best living animators, is no small deal. That vaunted animation is, as always, impeccable; the voice actors, from Disney stalwarts Holland and Pratt to newcomers Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and Octavia Spencer, are game and capable; and the plot, as banal as it can be, hits its marks well enough. Nothing here is bad, but everything lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Maybe it’s because Pixar’s making more movies more frequently than it used to, maybe it’s because Disney is exerting greater creative control, maybe it’s because every animated movie I’ve seen after Into the Spider-Verse has felt just a little less fun in comparison. But whatever the reason, ultimately, I was most disheartened not by what Onward was, but what it wasn’t. 

Because when Onward finally lets loose and leans into the delightful incongruity of its setting, the results can be, well, magical. Most of the movie exists as no more than a palette-swap–dragons for dogs, mushroom tops for gabled roofs, ogres and cyclops for schoolchildren–but whenever it lets itself grapple with its stated identity, a land built by a magic now forgotten, it becomes a blast. I got my first hint of this with the Manticore’s Tavern, once a hub of adventure run by the fearsome Manticore, now a family restaurant because that brings far fewer lawsuits. It’s not the freshest of bits, but it’s the first time since the inciting incident that the film really feels like it’s doing something worth noting. We get intermittent spurts of activity all the way up until the final scene, an exhilarating setpiece with Onward’s most clever both-worlds design by far. It’s all the more a shame, then, that the rest seems almost defiant in its refusal to let itself have fun with its own premise. I’m reminded of Zootopia, a movie with another far-out premise that absolutely overflowed with creativity and sheer visual glee. Onward sets itself up for the same kind of ingenuity, but is almost afraid to engage with it. We never get to see what a car designed for centaurs looks like, we’re not allowed different classroom desks for a populace demonstrably variable in size and species, and the motorcycle-riding pixies, an idea the film is clearly proud of, don’t get any kind of screentime to explain how they’re doing what they’re doing. We just see motorcycles driving, and are asked to fill in the blanks ourselves. 

Again, truly, it isn’t a bad movie. It is, however, a markedly disappointing one. Almost all Pixar movies, even the ones I don’t really care for (Up and Inside Out are the big two) reliably swing for the fences, which is why it’s such a letdown that Onward never really strives for anything beyond competence. And maybe, for some folks, that’s enough; Pixar is playing to its core proficiencies here, and it’s doing so with a significant amount of talent and experience. But I’ve come to expect more, and frankly, much like the world it inhabits, Onward is in desperate need of a little more magic.

A week or two before Sonic the Hedgehog was released, I started seeing ads on buses that featured Sonic standing across from Jim Carrey’s Dr. Robotnik, subtitled “Chillin’ Vs. Villain.” This confused me, because, if you’ll pardon my pedantry: “Chillin’” is, more or less, the polar opposite of Sonic’s whole deal. I’ve no great affinity for the character or the games he’s from, but as I understand it, Sonic’s primary drive, his id if you will, is not chillin’, but going fast. I didn’t think much more of it because it’s the year of our Lord 2020 and I’ll be damned if I lose sleep over Sonic, but the ads still threw me off until I saw the movie last night. It was no error, I realized, but a premonition, a harbinger for a film whose entire M.O. consists of throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks. Yes, it’s only there because it rhymes and has the same psychic footprint as a catchphrase. Much like the slightly grating ambiguity of “Chillin’ Vs. Villain,” Sonic the Hedgehog feels like it was created by several dozen different committees, hand-designed to momentarily divert your attention and then pull away. Here’s the thing, though; I’ve clearly retained “Chillin’ Vs. Villain.” I cannot suspect, given one week’s time, I’ll be able to say the same about Sonic. 

The movie opens at a suitably breakneck pace, tearing through what felt like either five or fifty minutes of exposition to explain how Sonic, a space alien (?), gets hunted for his speed (?), watches his mother (?) die (?), and then ends up on Earth. Sure, I guess, why not. Scared of being captured, Sonic (Ben Schwartz) watches the humans of Green Hills, Montana, from afar, until one night he runs around a baseball diamond so fast it blacks out the electricity in the continental United States (??) and must seek help from a stranger he’s grown fond of, James Marsden’s Sheriff Tom Wachowski. This is about all the plot you’ll get, though, because Sonic the Hedgehog is less a movie and more like a collection of ingredients thrown into a tumble dryer: An inexhaustible arsenal of ten-second poignant music clips, dropped in for the appropriate ten seconds whenever a character says something serious. Two separate uses of the “yeah, that’s me” freeze frame. Sonic mimicking the Quicksilver thing where he freezes time and gets into shenanigans. Sonic saying a quip that often, but not always, holds relevance to his current situation. Sonic doing a Fortnite dance. 

There is precisely one unmitigated bright spot in Sonic the Hedgehog, and you’ll get no points for correctly guessing it, because obviously it’s Jim Carrey, who drops back into Ace Ventura territory to play the smirking Dr. Robotnik exactly how you’d expect him to, and against all odds, the schtick stays amusing. Carrey is, if nothing else, a technician, and his preternatural control over his vocal and facial musculature is in full bloom here, and while Robotnik isn’t anything new, his twitchy megalomania is the only consistently entertaining part of the movie. I suspect that sometime during production, the team recognized this, too, and started giving Carrey as much of the spotlight as they could. From costumes, Robotnik gets gloves with remote control buttons on the palm, a device Carrey uses with self-evident glee. From design and VFX, Robotnik gets his robots, sleek white and red drones that serve as matryoshka dolls for increasingly smaller and deadlier drones, in the movie’s only real visual flair. From the script and casting departments, Robotnik gets a straight man to bounce off, as well as the only lines with any wit to them (“I see you’ve taken a lover. Does she have a name, or shall we just call her collateral damage?”). There’s even a scene where Robotnik has to compile some data, and we could have done another scene in the interim or just made the compiling instantaneous, but instead we’re just treated to a few minutes of Carrey barreling the camera as he dances on a holo-deck. 

He can’t hold up the entire movie on his own, though, which is an especial shame because he’s really, really trying to. Every time Robotnik is absent, Sonic slows to a crawl. There’s no script, just a collection of actors taking turns to say something sarcastic. Despite all the VFX work done, there’s little of interest to see at any point, and even despite a dramatic eleventh-hour redesign Sonic himself just looks…fine. Whatever. It’s fine. If it feels like I’m scrounging for things to talk about, it’s because I am, so much so that I apparently had to open this review describing an ad I saw on a bus. I wish Sonic the Hedgehog was either a better or a worse movie, because then I can find some kind of foothold to talk about it; as it stands now, it’s barely functional and that’s it, absolute kryptonite for a review and worse for a viewer. It’s not fun, but it’s not offensive. It’s not dull, but it’s not clever either. Sonic kind of just shows up. This is the only movie I can remember falling asleep during. 

And that, I think, is what I resent about it. I was a child once, and am now an adult; I know what comes from optimism, and especially optimism by way of video game movies. But the bare minimum I ask of any given film is for it to entertain me, and Sonic just doesn’t. When the initial design was first released, muscular calves and human teeth and all, I was shocked and repulsed just like the rest of you, but I was also distinctly excited to see what possibly could come of this horrid little creature. Maybe 1993’s uncanny Super Mario Bros. would finally have an answer from across the digital aisle. But if you’ll pardon the following turn of phrase, Sonic has been neutered, along with anything, good or bad, that could be considered engaging, in favor of what is acceptable. And sure, yes, maybe I’m a grouch complaining that the brightly colored video game movie for kids didn’t live up to my personal criteria for Art. Perhaps it’s wrong of me to expect engaging things from this. Except no, it isn’t; remember The LEGO Movie? Or heck, if we’re talking about brightly colored video game movies for kids, remember Wreck-It Ralph? It’s difficult, but possible, to hammer and reshape product placement into something innovative and poignant. The worst part of Sonic the Hedgehog is that it doesn’t even try.