Dreamworks

(On Cable TV, April 2020) There’s been a surprising number of movies about yetis, sasquatches and other hominids lately, and Abominable does struggle a bit to distinguish itself. (If you’ve lost track, as I did, keep in mind that Smallfoot [2018] is the Warner Brothers Animation one, The Missing Link [2019] is the Laika stop-motion one, and Abominable [2019] is the Dreamworks one.) What does help set Abominable apart is that it’s perhaps the least funny of the bunch, and the one that’s clearly, definitely, undoubtedly set in China, from the setting to the use of the “nine-dash line” that got the film banned or cut in several neighbouring countries. (Albeit branded as if from “Dreamworks,” the film was majority-financed by Chinese interests—and that adds to the whole “Hollywood coopted by China” trend of the 2010s.) The story has to do with a young woman discovering a yeti living on the roof of her building, and the adventures they have while trying to get the yeti back home as the yeti’s previous captors pursue them. Yeti aside, Abominable clearly dips into supernatural (or at least magical) plot devices from time to time. While definitely a family film, it’s nonetheless a bit more insistent on the drama thanks to a lost-family motif, some action scenes with dangerous stakes and clear antagonists—closer to an adventure than an outright comedy. I did like the antagonist a lot—although a bespectacled curly-haired redhead is pushing a lot of buttons for me. Beautifully animated and competently directed, Abominable is also ordinary—it does most things right, but doesn’t colour too much outside the box defined by other animated family films, with a special slavishness to (what else?) the Dreamworks structure and model. It’s likable enough (that yeti is very cute), but wholly unsurprising at the same time. If you want a yeti comedy, look at Smallfoot; if you want unpredictability, watch The Missing Link.

(In French, Netflix Streaming, March 2020) Every so often, I end up belatedly watching a film I should have seen much earlier, and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas is the newest of those. A classic swashbuckling adventure in a fantasy universe of gods and monsters, this animated film packs a punch in a too-short 80 minutes. Sinbad and his crew go looking for a magical book in order to counter the plans of a chaotic goddess, but the point of the film is found in the many episodic adventures they have along the way. The animation is a mixture of 2D cell and 3D-CGI, and like many turn-of-the-century films, the integration of the two is rarely seamless despite a few technical achievements. Sinbad is on firmer ground when it comes to dialogue, with better-than-average repartee between its characters and two fairly strong female characters to round up the cast. Considering some suggestive content and the sex-appeal of the characters, the film may be more appropriate for older kids rather than the entire family. A few anachronisms and a cosmic framing device make the film feel even bigger and more fun than the strict narration of its adventures. Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas is quite enjoyable despite a few flaws, so much so that it seems to end too quickly.