The Boss Baby (2017)

(In French, Video On-Demand, July 2017) Another month, another animated film … and lest anything think I’m complaining about quality, I’m not—most animated movies these days are consistently enjoyable. I’m actually complaining about the sameness of most animated movies. Once you’ve thrown in the anthropomorphized characters, chase sequences, montages and pop song, many animated movies all follow more or less a consistent tone. The Boss Baby is no exception, although its own internal mythology is wilder (and less credible) than most. It does play effectively with some of the current baby and parenting clichés (although, having watched it in French, I had to back-translate some material to make sense of the jokes) and makes up for innocuous family viewing. As a pre-school buddy comedy, it’s not too bad … but it does feel generic most of the time. You can file this one solidly in the average middle for Dreamworks Animation’s releases.