TOY STORY 5

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Special Effects: B+

Do we really need five of these Toy Story movies? I suppose you could say Disney and Pixar Animation Studios has made each one for a different generation—at least since Toy Story 2, which came out four years after the 1995 original that ushered in a new era of computer-animated movies that changed animated feature filmmaking forever. The thing is, though, that movie was also incredibly inventive on visual, stylistic and narrative levels, and it set the bar incredibly high for Pixar, which it met for nearly two decades thereafter. Toy Story 2 in 1999 was shockingly on par with its predecessor, and then, eleven years later, Toy Story 3 was the first and only film I’ve ever reviewed that was both the third in a series and the best film in the year it was released (2010). It was yet another nine years later when Toy Story 4 (2019) was released, and although it was highly acclaimed, I found it to be fun but slightly overrated, the first in this franchise not quite up to the task of justifying its own existence.

But, let’s say you were 5 years old when the first Toy Story came out. (Oh me? I was 19.) You would have been 9 when Toy Story 2 was released; 20 when Toy Story 3 was released; 29 with Toy Story 4; and now 36 with Toy Story 5. Kids have literally grown up with these movies, are are old enough now to have children of their own with the ability to understand some of the in-jokes. Toy Story, along with Pixar Animation Studios itself, has a history spanning over three decades. And while I can’t say it’s a bad thing per se that they keep returning to this particular well, I do find myself wishing they would get back to more original material, like they did far more consistently in their first couple of decades. (I can tell you this much: all of these movies are far better than the 2022 misfire Lightyear.)

Each Toy Story movie adds new toy characters to its cast, while struggling to retain the core cast from every movie since the others were introduced, always running the risk of being overstuffed. It’s been so long now since the first installment that some of the voice actors have died: Jeff Bergman has replaced Don Rickles as Mr. Potato Head; Blake Clark has replaced Jim Varney as Slinky Dog; Anna Vocino has replaced Estelle Harris as Mrs. Potato Head. Some of these iconic voices from the earlier films have been replaced by what sound like generic replacements, and unfortunately that sort of fits into the direction these last couple of films have been leaning.

Does any of that mean I didn’t still enjoy it? Of course not! I might even go so far as to say I liked 5 slightly better than 4, even if I wasn’t quite as impressed with that looks like pretty standard Pixar visual renderings these days. This one features a delightful subplot, which the narrative switches back and forth from, of about 50 Buzz Lightyears spilling from a shipping container crashed on a deserted island—this is, in fact, how the film opens. All of these Lightyears, convinced they are actually Buzz and having no idea they are toys, until they go on a quest across the sea that ultimately has them running across our regular heroes in the middle of their own story.

These movies have always been cram packed with ideas, with a lot to say and with only slightly varying levels of success. They all touch on how our perceptions of prized possessions change as we grow up, and this is a franchise that has always explored the question of how that might affect toys themselves. Toy Story 5, co-directed and co-written by McKenna Harris and Andrew Stanton, is a bit late in the game to bring up the effect of excessive screen time on kids; this is a premise that would have worked even better in 2019 with 4, and could maybe even have worked in 2010 with 3.

This time, little Bonnie (voiced by different actors in each of the three films she’s appeared in, this time by Scarlett Spears) is gifted a new toy that is a tablet for kids, here designed and named as “Lilypad,” or “Lily” (Greta Lee) for short. She serves as the primary antagonist in the story this time around, but not in quite the way you might go in expecting. Instead of being straight up villainous, there’s just a lot of misunderstanding between Lily and the other toys—once again led by Woody and Buzz Lightyear, and I suppose they’ll keep making these movies as long as Tom Hanks and Tim Allen are alive to voice them—as all of them are just taking different approaches to what they sincerely feel is best for the kid who plays with them. Even though we get wide shots of multiple houses in which kids are just sitting looking at screens, it feels as though this movie is raising its hands in surrender to the inevitability of what characters consistently just call “tech,” and ultimately it comes to the conclusion that the best approach is to let a combination of electronic and analog objects work together to ignite a child’s imagination.

The most significant new characters this time around are all older versions of electronic devices themselves: Shelby Rabara as Snappy the toy camera; Craig Robinson as Atlas the GPS hippo; and most delightful of all, Conan O'Brien as Smarty Pants, the electronic toilet training device. Smarty Pants gets all the biggest laugh lines in this movie, and I have to hand it to them, they could have run with truly cheap humor here but the literal toilet humor involved here is consistently clever and surprisingly subtle at times.

And that’s the thing with Toy Story 5, which invites you back into a comfortable world you love to return to, with all the old friends you love (Joan Cusack as Jessie—she might even have the most screen time—and Kristen Schaal as Trixie and Wallace Shawn as Rex and Annie Potts as Bo Peep and Tony Hale as Forky and many many more) and yet even more new friends you’re delighted to meet. But as much fun as I had watching this movie, and as easily as it affected me emotionally, often to the point of misty eyes, it is also by definition fundamentally unoriginal, which makes the script, arguably the most important part of a movie, its weakest link. And while it’s not extremely weak, it’s still easier to clock the contrivances with each one of these outings, taking us another step closer to boredom with each journey. There comes a point where it starts to feel a bit repetitive.

But, much like a TV show that loses its way but I keep watching because I love the characters, the winning characters and voice performances still keep me entertained. This is a franchise that achieved the unthinkable with three classic installments, and you could argue they should have stopped there. But this is clearly a well that Pixar will keep returning to as long as there is anything to pull out of it, and I suppose I’ll keep letting them take me to it as long as I’m having a good time.

It’s more of the same, but it’s so fun to return to

Overall: B+

HOPPERS

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

Has it finally happened? Have I become a contrarian crank? The old man who just doesn’t get it, who says Pixar movies were so much better back in my day? They just don’t make Pixar movies like they used to anymore! This is objectively true, actually, but does that matter to younger audiences? It’s certainly not going to matter to children, who will be perfectly entertained by Hoppers while I found it dumb as hell.

It’s a common refrain for me now, to say that Pixar once reliably made films that worked just as well for grownups as they did for children. They had a sophisticated sense of humor that made them stand apart from other animation studios. Those days began to end roughly a decade ago. Now the people at Pixar keep themselves afloat by riding their own coattails with endless sequels, interspersed with overstuffed nonsense like this.

I am reminded of The Wild Robot—a far superior film—and my one real complaint about it: that it depicts a wild animal world in which predators and prey become friends for the greater good. The same thing happens in Hoppers, they just don’t even do that as well. And Hoppers is a wildly derivative work of cinema. Its premise is so similar to that of Avatar, in fact, that the main character, Mabel (Piper Curda), literally says “This is like Avatar!” Mabel’s college professor mentor, Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy), immediately retorts, “It’s not like Avatar!” but the cat’s out of the bag.

Or the beaver is, I suppose. Because, for reasons that are never made clear (who cares, it’s a cartoon), Dr. Sam and her helpers are doing research on porting their brains into robot animals as a means of communicating with them in their own language—which is somehow the same among all species of animals except human. Mabel, who is desperately trying to save the forest glade where she grew up with her late grandmother in an early sequence reminiscent of (but nowhere near as good as) the growing-old montage at the beginning of Up. The mayor of the nearby city of Beaverton (Jon Hamm) has selfishly dislocated all the animals there in an attempt to make way for a freeway bypass that will save commuters four minutes. Seizing an opportunity, Mabel ports herself into the body of a robot beaver, and then unwittingly ignites an animal uprising against humans.

To call the plot of Hoppers convoluted would be an understatement, and I haven’t even yet mentioned that the animals basically split into different factions, one who take the idea overboard and declare all humans need to be “squished,” and one that understands that’s a little much. Will children even be able to follow this? Probably not. Will they be delighted by a lot of the cute and funny animals? Definitely yes. Will Hoppers enter the echelon of classic Pixar animated feature films, like the original Toy Story or Finding Nemo or The Incredibles or WALL-E? Not likely. This movie will be forgettable to children and grownups alike.

I keep thinking about the 2022 film Lightyear, the first Pixar film I rated as low as a C+. And here we are again. The difference was that was an extension of an already-existing franchise, one that already had four previous installments (the fourth one being the weakest of the bunch—and yet, I’ll come back for #5). Hoppers is easily the most disappointed I have ever been in a wholly original Pixar film. It’s way too busy. It’s overstuffed. It’s convoluted. I don’t get it.

And this is a case where I am in the minority. At least in the case of Lightyear the response was definitively mixed. Hoppers is getting a pretty positive response, and I can only theorize that I am perhaps too whetted to what Pixar once was. Would I feel the same way about Hoppers if all else were the same but it were made by a different animation studio? I think I would, actually.

A lot of Disney properties stand the test of time, and Hoppers will not be one of them. You want to see a movie that examines relationships of substance using wildlife characters? Watch Bambi—which is not even my favorite Disney film, but I can recognize an enduring classic, complete with innovative animation techniques, when I see one. The makers of Hoppers are entertaining us, sure—I got a few good laughs—but they’re phoning it in. Why bother casting the likes of Meryl Streep as a megalomaniacal Insect Queen if you’re not even going to register that it’s her?

Setting all of that side, some wild shit happens in this movie. I probably shouldn’t spoil what happens with a flock of birds and a giant shark voiced by Vanessa Bayer, except to say that it’s ridiculous even by this movie’s standards. Director and co-writer Daniel Chong woke up one day and chose chaos. I was actually kind of locked in with Hoppers in the beginning, even though Mabel as a little girl is far more compelling than Mabel as a 19-year-old college student. I even leaned forward when Mabel found herself following a mysterious beaver into a science and technology lab. But then Mabel ports into a robot beaver, infiltrates a weirdly homogenous animal society, and winds up at a giant mound atop of which is King George the Mammal King beaver (Bobby Moynihan), to whom animals of all other species is bowing, and I’m just thinking, What the fuck is this? I haven’t even mentioned the brown bear (Melissa Villaseñor) who, much like in The Wild Robot, is for some reason everybody’s friend. She does eat a perfectly friendly fish at one point, so, points for that I guess.

I long for the days when Pixar made films that were both wildly entertaining and featured narratives of nuanced substance. In Hoppers, it feels like the relentlessly chaotic action exists to distract us from the fact that it’s all just empty calories for the mind. We might as well be plugging these looney antics right into our eye sockets, entertainment as overstimulating pacification. I want to say that Pixar is still capable of greatness, but it’s been a good five years since they last made something truly great; four since they squandered potential by dumping really good material direct to streaming. But I still believe in you, Pixar! I’m just waiting for you to climb to the top again, because this isn’t it.

Don’t ask.

Overall: C+

ARCO

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

I think I have finally pinpointed the primary reason I don’t care for anime. It’s the frame rate—or at least, the frame rate of moving objects. I prefer animation that looks more fluid, with a frame right high enough not to detect each individual frame with the naked eye. To be fair, anime covers a diverse array of visual styles, and some of it likely has higher frame rates; conversely, there are plenty of other animation styles that use lower frame rates. I don’t tend to care for those either. The key difference with a whole lot of anime is how it combines this style with stories that are either bonkers-weird or so culturally specific that I have no hope of understanding what’s going on.

You may be wondering why the hell I’m leading a review of a French animated feature that is definitively not anime with a paragraph about anime. Well, again: it’s the frame rate. We see our protagonist, the title character, picking fruit from a tree, and we see his arm in four positions as it raises up to the brand. Immediately I am thinking about how this was animated, rather than what the character is doing at this point in the story. I always find it a distraction.

At least this story is easy for me to follow. The closest this gets to bumping on cultural specificity is in the choice to release this film theatrically in the United States with American voice performances replacing the original French ones. This is the story of a preteen boy (Arco, voiced by Juliano Krue Valdi) who travels back in time from the year 2932 to 2075, and a trio of grown-men conspiracy theorists are sure they’ve discovered an alien in him, or some other equally mysterious entity, because of having seen a similar sight to Arco’s manner of arrival (with a streaking rainbow tail across the sky) twenty years earlier. In the American theatrical release, these men are voiced by Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea. They have several lines that just come across as somewhere on the line between odd and stilted. It was the thing that most made me wish I could have just watched Arco in the original French with subtitles. There’s a sense that there’s some level of nuance lost in translation.

And they got some pretty big names for the America voice actors. In the year 2075, Arco meets a preteen girl named Iris, voiced by Romy Fay, who is fairly unknown—but, her parents, only ever seen in hologram form because they are stuck at their jobs in the city, are voiced by Mark Ruffalo, and Natalie Portman (who also co-produced the film). Arco’s mother is voiced by America Ferrera. Another major character is Iris’s live-in nanny robot, Mikki, whose voice is a blend of Ruffalo and Portman.

The distracting frame rate aside, the animation is drawn beautifully. When we meet Arco, we are in 2932, and he is jealous of his sister who is of age and thus can legally time-travel with their parents. It seems they travel back in time to bring back specimens of fauna they mean to replicate. They wear hoods that have a diamond embedded in the forehead as a tool for time travel, and rainbow colored hoods. This makes them look a little like futuristic clowns. Maybe it’s a French thing. In any case, they live on platforms that sit on the ends of giant white stilts somewhat like trees, among the clouds. Arco sneaks out in the middle of the night, snatches his sister’s clown outfit, and leaps off the edge of his family’s platform—you’d think they would have protective railings in the future but whatever. The momentum of falling is what triggers the time travel.

Arco wants nothing more than to travel back in time and see dinosaurs in person. I get it, that would be pretty awesome. But he makes a mistake and winds up in 2075, when houses are protected by automated glass domes from everything from gale force rainstorms to giant wildfires. Unlike in the distant future, the people of 2075 are integrated into a society with countless sorts of humanoid robots: the nannies are robots; all the teachers at school are robots; the police are robots; robots swarm to streets to work on repairs on damage from storms. I found myself amused by a pair of “insurance bots” that show up at Iris’s door with a very blue collar demeanor, and one of of them looks down at a tablet. Wouldn’t the robot already have the information from the tablet already stored in its memory? Younger audiences, of course, would not think to nitpick about this. Whew, good thing I’m here!

In any event, everywhere and any time between 2932 and 2075, every frame of Arco is beautiful to look at. Maybe that’s part of the point of the lower frame rate: it’s easier to soak in each frame. I still find it distracting. Lower frame rates are often a sort of cheat to save on production costs, and I can respect that. It doesn’t mean I have to have a preference for it.

Time travel stories are always tricky, and I am impressed when writers (in this case, Ugo Bienvenu, who also directed, and Félix de Givry) find a clever way to close the inevitable loop created by it. Arco does a pretty good job of it, both in terms of Iris’s attempts at helping Arco find his way back home, and of where Iris’s life leads after meeting him and how that influences the future. Having such a direct influence on how humanity lives 857 years later seems like a stretch, but I guess I’ll allow it.

It’s a fun premise, a fun story, and a compelling way to look at where society might be in 50 years versus centuries after that. Arco is the kind of movie that works very well as both surface entertainment and a treasure trove of themes when you dig deeper. I have mixed feelings about the three men who are chasing after the kids, who are quite easy to suspect as villains at first and then turn out to be something else. I can’t quite decide of that something else quite works, but if nothing else, even with the stilted dialog as performed in English, they are entertaining. Such is the case with Arco overall.

I guess that’s one way to look ahead.

Overall: B+

ZOOTOPIA 2

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

If you really want to see a movie as delightful as Zootopia (2016), nine years later, then . . . why not just watch Zootopia again? That’s what I did, and I had a blast. I nearly forgot how good it was, how clever, how consistently funny. I probably would have enjoyed Zootopia 2 more had I not watched both movies one day after the other.

Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy Zootopia 2; I did, generally. It’s the “generally” that I’m a little hung up on, because this new film is something that takes a clever concept and then does little more than rehash it. A ton of the gags in this film aren’t even original, but rather simply a trotting out of the hits we already saw in the first one. You might not be as prone to noticing this if you don’t watch the films back to back, but you might still notice that Zootopia 2 has a bit of old-school sequel-itis. I kept thinking about Die Hard 2, and how many characters it brought back from the first film for the sake of nothing but having us say, “Hey! That guy!”

As always, none of this is going to matter to kids. They’ll just eat this up, I’m sure. But what historically sets Disney apart from other animation is how well it works as entertainment for grownups as well as the kids. To be fair, Zootopia is still relatively entertaining for adults too, albeit in a bit more of a pandering way. Disney has just been far better at it in the past—including the past Zootopia movie, which had a sly message about unlearning prejudices and a consistently effective sense of humor at the same time. A lot of the gags here feel kind of like they would have been cut from the first film, and then just got reassembled here.

We even get a return of Shakira as the pop star Gazelle, right down to the “live concert” footage that plays with the first few minutes of the end credits. Beat for beat, Zootopia is simply the same experience as Zootopia, just without the novelty or certainly any of the originality. Granted, even the original Zootopia recalled the 1973 animated Disney film Robin Hood, a favorite of mine in childhood, but at least it put a new spin on the concept. There are no new spins to be found in this new film, which throws out a lot more movie reference gags for the grown-ups: a hedge maze with the iconic The Shining synthesizer score, a brief reappearance of Bellwether the sheep (Jenny Slate) behind a glass wall like The Silence of the Lambs (get it?). Unlike the first film, in which a reference to The Godather also served to move the story forward, these references exist only for their own sake.

They’re still fun, I guess. And although the relationship between Judy Hopps the bunny (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Nick Wilde the fox (Jason Bateman) strangely skirts the edges of romance but consistently lands firmly in the realm of “friendship,” an inevitable rift between them and their subsequent emotional reconciliation actually got my eyes a little damp. Maybe I’m just getting as soft as these animals.

Except, here’s the “twist” in Zootopia 2: instead of a society consisting only of mammals (side note, maybe my favorite gag was when they crash a “Burning Mammal” festival), we learn of an underground society of reptiles, pushed to the edges of Zootopia a century ago, the city being tricked into thinking of them all as untrustworthy. Never mind that this is nearly identical to the rift between two factions in the first film, predator versus prey. The cartoon logic of how these animals “evolved” made more sense in the first film, but the more into the weeds it gets in this second film, the less the logic holds. Not that cartoons were ever meant to be logical, I get it! There’s still something to be said for skilled weaving of a narrative, and Zootopia 2 is just a slightly degraded copy of an original. We do get a snake voiced by Ke Huy Quan, and a beaver voiced by Fortune Feimster. The aquatic mammal borough of Zootopia proves more fun and interesting than the reptile underground.

The animation is very well rendered, if often hard to focus on with all the quick-cutting action. The plot holds okay, as we learn about “weather walls” that control separate climates for different borough/habitats of the city, while I find myself wondering how any of them can visit any other, more inhospitable environments for any real amount of time and in so doing keep a whole city humming. But then, I think too much. It’s not that deep, right? Except Zootopia 2 clearly wants it to be, what with the continued, and slightly less sly, messaging about accepting each other for who we truly are. The allegorical component remains strong in this film, it just has a comparative lack of finesse. It’s just fun enough, but unexceptional, time at the movies.

I never thought I’d be this happy about the distraction of a beaver.

Overall: B

ELIO

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

Elio had its hooks into me from the very beginning. I really thought, until all the alien stuff started happening, that I might love this movie in a way I haven’t loved a Pixar film in a while, since their early days of one animated feature masterpiece after the other.

In retrospect, that was kind of the point. After thirty years of cinema history, Pixar has a playbook, and Elio very much follows it. I could mention who wrote the script, but who has time for that? This movie has nine credited writers. It feels a little like an advanced AI was prompted to “write a Pixar movie.” Opening sequence with overtones of incongruous sadness? Check! Lonely child protagonist who has lost either one or both parents? Check! Eventual non-human buddy for said child designed or optimum merchandising potential? Check!

Maybe I’ve just gotten old and cynical, but unfortunately, Pixar is feeling its age a bit as well. I was charmed well enough by Elio, but I could also see that it worked because of a well-worn and successful formula. The story is permeated by layers of familiarity. Pixar is supposed to be pushing the boundaries of the form, but Elio often feels like a cross between E.T. and Finding Nemo, at least in terms of its world-building.

Don’t get me wrong. Small children will almost certainly love this movie. Not that small children have standards. I long for the days of Pixar’s revolutionary depth of sophistication, both visual and thematic. WALL-E (2008) or Inside Out (2015), this is not. This is more on par with Onward (2020) or Luca (2021), more recent titles that push Pixar closer to the realm of “generic.” Elio is certainly flashier than those other recent films, and as such will probably dazzle kids more successfully, with its alien characters that are wildly varied, in both physical form and personality.

There’s still something missing, though, a certain depth of imagination. The visuals here are rendered well, but they take sometimes surprisingly rudimentary form. When Elio is sucked through a portal from earth by the aliens he so desperately wants to be abducted by, the tunnel of shifting lights and forms he glides through are patterns of simple goemetric shapes.

Elio begins with a huge amount of potential—even as it recognizably tugs at our heartstrings, introducing us to his aunt, Olga (Zoe Saldaña), who is still getting used to taking care of Elio (Yonas Kibreab) after the death of his parents. Olga being too busy with work to pay enough attention to him, and Elio’s deep loneliness and difficulty connecting, is all very familiar territory. But then we find out he is obsessed with connecting with life on other planets, and in particular the Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977 and equipped with a “Golden Record,” pressed with greetings in many languages from Earth.

Both Voyager 1 and the Golden Record figure prominently in the plot of Elio, which is easy to imagine catching the attention of anyone with an obsession with the intersection of science and history. Elio lends these artifacts appropriate thematic weight—until it doesn’t. In the end, these things are just used as plot devices for something . . . cute. If it ignites interest in any other kids in these artifacts, I suppose that’s a plus. But the story of Elio takes everything predictably back to themes of familial connection, using alien characters, half of which look like exotic sea creatures and half of which look like robots, as the vessel.

Elio himself is a delightful, charming, and deeply empathetic character, voiced well by Yonas Kibreab and rendered with visual nuance. The same goes for Olga, and the arc of these two, disconnected and then finding each other, was indeed something that moved me. I even got teary-eyed a couple of times. A formula that works is still a formula, and it’s the trappings that really make all the difference in greatness. Once aliens hear Elio’s call to come and get him, Elio spends much more time on standard cuteness than on anything truly meaningful.

Perhaps I ask too much of this movie. Indeed, not every movie has to mean something. My issue here is that Pixar spent years setting an industry standard, and now other studios are meeting that standard more than they do. It makes me sad. For the most part, Elio works—but, it works as a fairly generic entertainment, one that no one will be talking about generations from now, certainly not like they do with Toy Story or Finding Nemo or even Inside Out (all of which got boosts from sequels, granted—but good ones, all of them better than Elio).

I am constantly saying a movie should be judged on its own terms. That’s just the trouble with Elio, though: none of its terms are really its own. It’s a Frankenstein of Pixar films, stitched from previously used elements that saw better days in their previous lives. I had a pretty good time watching it, I smiled a lot, I suppose that counts for something. I’m also going to post this review and then get on with my life without ever really thinking about this movie again.

We know how to have fun, right?

Overall: B-

DOG MAN

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

Dog Man is a cute, sweet, sporadically very funny movie, based on a series of graphic novels of the same name by Dav Pilkey, which were themselves a spinoff of Pilkey’s original Captain Underpants illustrated novel series. Dog Man is also overstuffed with antic plotting, and feels a bit overlong even at an 89-minute runtime. Surely young kids will love it; they don’t care about nuances of criticism. As for how the adults will like it when they take children to see it? Well, they won’t likely hate it, at least.

On the topic of animated feature films that manage to reach both children and adults at their own levels simultaneously, Dog Man is impressive in how often it manages this, even without particularly sophisticated or subversively “adult” humor. This movie is wholesome top to bottom, and is only rated PG, I would assume, because of the cartoon violence in it. The protagonist is a loyal dog’s head transplanted onto the body of his beloved police officer master, after all, and director and co-writer Peter Hastings (collaborating with Pilkey on the script) somewhat pointedly skirts past the darker implications there. This means Officer Knight is effectively dead, right? Someone tell all the children in the screenings so they understand! Actually, I’d have more respect for this film if it found some way to say Officer Knight—or his head, anyway—had gone to live on a farm.

Indeed, there is a vibe of some missed opportunity with Dog Man, a film that is filled with self-awareness and packed with jokes and sight gags—I enjoyed the gag where two characters argued on opposite sides of a split screen and one of them literally grabbed the line splitting the image. It’s that kind of subtly meta stuff that really works in this movie. Unfortunately, while many of the jokes land, plenty of them don’t, and the latter happen when the story sags under the weight of its own bloat.

I keep thinking of the halcyon days of the 75-minute animated feature film, something that was far more common roughly thirty years ago and earlier. This is much more appropriate to the attention span of young child audiences, and many animated features in the past decade—specifically those meant for kids—have leaned closer to an hour and 45 minutes. Given the desire for theaters to maximize showtimes and therefore ticket sales, I’m at a loss as to what the endgame is there, unless the skill of the storytelling justifies the length, which is rare. And getting to Dog Man, this is a film that would land far more effectively for adults and children alike with a runtime closer to 75 minutes, but for some reason filmmakers seem to think they need to “flesh out” these stories.

But Dog Man is exceedingly simple: once Dog and Man combine, they become a “Supa Cop,” easily capturing OK City’s biggest villain, Petey the (of course) evil cat—voiced pretty entertainingly by Pete Davidson. He plots to take over the world and rid it of all “do-gooders,” going so far as to clone himself, not realizing the clone will appear as a kitten who won’t grow up for 18 years. “Li’l Petey” (voiced adorably by Lucas Hopkins Calderon) comes out of the clone machine—easily ordered by mail by Petey—with an innocence that, naturally, brings everyone together in the end. Spoilers!

Anyway, Petey is just as good at escaping prison—in an admittedly delightful montage—as Dog Man is at catching him, so this just becomes a cycle until Petey ups the ante with all manner of wild inventions, including my favorite: a robot he calls “80-Hexatron Droidformigon,” or “80-HD.” The robot becomes a quasi-character in its own right, although the rest of the cast is much more amusing, including Lil Red Howery as Dog Man’s bumbling police Chief; Cheri Oteri as OK City’s comically corrupt Mayor; Isla Fisher as ambitious TV reporter Sarah Hatoff; Stephen Root as Petey’s deadbeat dad; and Ricky Gervais as the movie’s most baffling character, an evil fish villain named Flippy. (Look for the obvious Aliens reference when Flippy goes after Li’l Petey and Petey shouts, “Get away from him you fish!”)

Flippy makes a nice segue into what doesn’t work all that well in Dog Man. Flippy serves as a villain to unite all the others against, but the plot mechanics are unnecessarily convoluted, and the “climactic” sequence this ushers in is less exciting than it is baffling. Literal buildings are brought to life as sort of building-monsters that wreak havoc, almost Gozilla-style. Dog Man winds up operating a giant “Mecha Mail Man” to battle them with. It’s all very: what? Although it still gets a few funny gags, none of it really works as well as the rest of the movie does.

Ultimately, Dog Man falls into the same trap nearly every other superhero movie does, predictably ending in a massive, ridiculously high-stakes battle blowout. Who the hell created the rule that every superhero movie has to end this way? Peter Hastings does smuggle in a subtle (and very brief) commentary on this very trope, but while also fully participating in it. I’d have much preferred a resolution only between Dog Man, Petey and Li’l Petey without any involvement with a supervillain fish and monster buildings. And haven’t we had enough of Ricky Gervais anyway? There’s a man who started off strong and then long outlasted his welcome.

To be fair, as “superhero movies” go, Dog Man is unlike any other. It just would have been far more successful, even on its own terms, with some script polishing and tightening of the editing. It wasn’t what I wanted nor what it could have been, but to its credit, I still had a good time. And none of my criticisms will mean anything whatsoever to a seven-year-old who will certainly have a blast watching it.

Just do your job Dog Man!

Overall: B

FLOW

Directing: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A+
Animation: A+

I’m not sure I can adequately explain how much I loved this movie. Flow is not just the best animated film of the year by a mile, it’s within striking distance of being the best film of the year overall. Critics love to throw around the word “triumph,” but here it legitimately applies. This is a film that transcends any cliché.

There are so many impressive things about Flow, it can be difficult to decide where to begin. How about the animation: Latvian director and co-writer Gints Zilbalodis, and his team, rendered the gorgeous animation entirely with the open-source software Blender. He also never makes clear what created the specificity of the world presented therein, with its undercurrent of haunting melancholy which is still somehow also beautiful: the characters in Flow are all feral or wild animals, inhabiting a world once inhabited by humans, recently even, but we never see any. The closest to a human character we see is a humanoid statue, and beyond that, the remnants of artistic carvings left inside a house that a cat has been using for shelter.

We never get any indication that the cat ever knew the human who once lived in that house, although we see wood carvings of cats mid-project, evidently abandoned. Finished cat carvings, most only slightly bigger than the live cat we follow in Flow, dot the yard in font of the house, right down to the bank of a passing river. The human artist was apparently quite obsessive about cats: we briefly see a cat statue so huge it has scaffolding around it.

This live cat is the closest thing Flow has to a protagonist. It encounters other animals, some more than once, but the cat is the only animal we always follow: from the opening scene of it considering itself in the reflection of the river water, to the closing scene of it doing the same. In between those bookends, we discover that there is a cyclical nature to either the world’s climate or its geology—or both—wherein the area floods to a massive degree, and then after several days, the water recedes. The cat moves to different areas of higher ground after getting swept away by a massive flood which is then followed by steady water rise, until it is trapped atop the aforementioned giant cat statue.

A drifting sailboat luckily passes by, and the cat manages to make its way onto it. Much of Flow is spent with the cat on this wooden boat, which already has another animal on it: a capybara. Over time, a sort of team of animals amasses on the boat: a ring-tailed lemur; a secretarybird; a yellow Labrador Retriever; eventually the rest of the pack of dogs that Lab has been running with—which, of course, complicates the group dynamic on the boat.

Unlike other animated films of this sort, there is no dialogue in Flow: none of the animals talk. This is an excellent choice. They do, however, make vocalizations, which are used to flesh out a personality, of sorts, for each animal. With only one exception, recordings of the species’s actual vocalizations were used for each animal we see in this film. Only the capybara stands apart, as the recordings they got from one at a zoo did not work well for the capybara’s personality in this film, so they used a baby camel’s sounds instead.

These choices make Flow particularly stand apart from films like WALL-E, which is basically a silent film in its first half but introduces cartoon humans in its second half; or Bambi, which 80 years ago innovated natural-world movements in animation but still featured talking animals. To be clear, Flow does anthropomorphize its animals, a reasonable choice as otherwise we’d just be watching a bunch of adorable animals drown or get eaten. It must be stressed, however, how subtly Zilbalodis does this: each of the animals move and vocalize only the way their species actually does in the real world. And then, the secretarybird and even the cat are using the rudder to steer the sailboat for some time before it even registers that’s what’s happening.

There is no villain in Flow, only the constant specter of danger—particularly for the cat, who falls out of the boat and into the water far more times than any small child would likely want to see (there’s a reason this film is rated PG). Given the cat is the primary character, I was sure we would get to the end with it alive and well—or would we? There is only one moment where Flow gets mystical, the cat and the secretarybird suddenly floating into the air toward a swirling celestial sky. I really wondered if we were supposed to be witnessing their deaths. I’m still not quite sure when it comes to the bird.

I see no need to dwell on it, though. Flow is a stunning achievement just in how easily it locks in its audience, from start to finish, without any dialogue beyond real animal noises. I found everything about this film utterly mesmerizing, and by turns suspenseful, sad, occasionally funny, and heartbreaking. One could call the dogs comic relief, they are such doofuses sometimes. But they only ever act like dogs, aside from occasional teamwork in an attempt to help another animal. Until a bunny hops by anyway.

There’s even a whale, who gets comparatively limited screen time and yet it has a story arc, just like any of the other animals. The whale is just as susceptible, if not more so, to the perils of rapidly rising and receding waters as any of the others. I spent a lot of time watching this movie either dazzled or with my heart in my throat. The visual achievement cannot be overstated, particularly the cinematography, where the “camera” is constantly swaying back and forth or swirling around the action, giving it very much the feel of something that was actually captured on camera. And after a tightly edited 84 minutes, the story comes full circle, with the strong suggestion that what all these animals have gone through, they will likely go through again. I don’t want that for them, but I am eager to turn right around and watch this film again, many times over.

Times of crisis make strange bedfellows. Or boatfellows.

Overall: A

PIECE BY PIECE

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

Pharrell Williams really wants you to know how pleased with himself he is that he wants the documentary about him and his music career to be a LEGO movie. Lego Pharrell comments on it multiple times, on camera.

It’s cute. And undeniably entertaining. It’s also a transparent tactic, a way for Williams to put up a wall between him and his viewers, so we never really get to know him. Piece by Piece is little more than a broad overview of his three-decade career in hip hop and pop, touching on all of the key beats, tracks and singles Williams worked on or released. Quite the parade of superstars he’s worked with appears onscreen as LEGO talking heads (Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Busta Rhymes, Timbaland, Jay-Z, and countless more, including Chad Hugo, Williams’s other half in The Neptunes), none of them given enough screen time to offer anything in the way of real insight.

I went to this movie already knowing to expect this. But director and co-writer Morgan Neville really won me over in the first half of the 93-minute runtime, employing clever visual flourishes that can only be possible by animating the stories being told. Some great visual gags get sprinkled into the narrative, some of them LEGO-specific: a young Pharrell watching Star Trek attempts the Vulcan salute, only to discover it’s not possible with his cylindrical LEGO hands. Plenty of other whimsical delights pass across the screen, particularly when talking heads throw out a hypothetical aside, such as E.T. freaking everyone out at the mall.

So, for a good while, I was thinking Piece by Piece was actually much more fun than I had been led to believe. The LEGO animation is very colorful and imaginative, making this a singular moviegoing experience, even among documentaries that play with form and genre.

But later, things get genuinely weird, and not necessarily in a good way. Making a big deal out of the fact that Williams’s wife, Helen Lasichanh, is giving her first-ever on-camera interview doesn’t quite mean as much when we only ever see her as a Lego Lady. And when the content turns serious, it’s easy to become ambiguous about the use of LEGO to tell this story. There’s a moment when Pharrell breaks down crying, in gratitude for all the friends and family that stood by him over the years. A LEGO version of Morgan Neville—who gets a surprising lot of screen time—offers him a box of tissue. Seeing this scene play out among LEGO pieces is fundamentally ridiculous and undermines the impact.

And I haven’t even mentioned the LEGO representations of moments of historic import, including the Martin Luther King rally on the National Mall, and even the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. I saw these scenes flash onscreen and thought: okay, this is bonkers. Outside of these visual references, the vast majority of Piece by Piece renders its subjects with the same childlike joy that we’ve seen in nearly all the characters in previous LEGO movies. Their vocal delivery, as sitting interview subjects, indicates their expressions are much more neutral most of the time, and yet their LEGO selves typically speak with some manner of smiles on their faces.

After a while, this stuff creates a unique sort of cognitive dissonance, even more pronounced by the use of this gimmick to create some distance between Pharrell Williams and those who are interested in him. Certainly nothing in Piece by Piece reveals what makes him tick, or even gives much of a sense of who he truly is as a person. The whole exercise feels like an attempt at having his cake and eating it too: he let someone make a movie about him, but he didn’t have to reveal anything genuine about himself. I’d have settled for some insight into how becoming one of the first superstar producers ever to exist really affected him on a deep level, but, no such luck.

In the end, we’ll just have to let Pharrell Williams’s work speak for itself, which it does plenty well with or without Piece by Piece. As I write this, I am listening to the soundtrack, packed with all the biggest hits he produced along with five new tracks, and that is a spectacular experience, highly recommend. This is a man with jaw dropping talent, in a movie animated by people with incredible talent, and the two just don’t much inform each other. At least we get clever gags like “PG Spray” used in the room where Snoop Dogg is interviewed, keeping things family-friendly in a story about a guy your young children don’t likely know or care about.

Clap along if you feel like LEGO’s what you want to do,

Overall: B

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