Sony Pictures Animation

The Star (2017)

The Star (2017)

(On Cable TV, January 2019) The increasingly affordable nature of computer animation means that you now often get small studios taking chances on projects that would have been too odd or niche to accomplish at a higher budget. Hence The Star. A nativity story featuring talking-animal comedy is not exactly the kind of thing that seems obvious—the mixture of the sacred and the, ahem, profane is odd enough, but with a budget set at $20M it became a conceptually profitable endeavour even for a major studio such as Sony (working with Cinesite’s Montréal Studio), distributing a film far more faith-based than most Hollywood releases. The budget most clearly shows in the rather amazing voice cast assembled here, from Oprah to Tyler Perry to Ving Rhames to Zachary Levy to Kristin Chenoweth to Christopher Plummer—with Mariah Carey singing along the way. Still, the strange blend of religious earnestness and talking-animal comedy does works better than expected, and The Star should become a minor holiday reference for a few years to come.

Peter Rabbit (2018)

Peter Rabbit (2018)

(In French, in theatres, March 2018) Considering that I’m reading Beatrix Potter’s stories to my daughter these days, I should be outraged that the screen adaptation of her Peter Rabbit tales pretty much makes a mockery of the original. Peter Rabbit features a petulant mischief-maker, all the animal characters have radically different personalities from the book, the tone has gone from pastoral whimsies to modern slapstick, and Potter herself is portrayed as an artist with a kooky side. Much of the plot has become a romantic triangle between Potter, a clumsy suitor and Peter Rabbit. The film has been put through the homogenization process that makes the result feel a lot like your usual live action talking-animal kids movie à la Beverly Hills Chihuahua or The Smurfs. And yet, and yet … it may be my residual liking for writer/director Will Gluck’s first few movies and overall sense of humour, but I found Peter Rabbit surprisingly easy to like. I’m not that fond of the film’s lowest-denominator approach to physical humour (some of the gags are just dumb, and other cross the line into things I rather would have cut), but it’s a high-energy film, and once you distance yourself from the Potter mythos, it’s just about slightly better than comparable kids’ films. It all converges to an expectedly sweet conclusion, and many of the peripheral characters have one or two good scenes. The special effects are as good as we can expect from state-of-the-art Sony Pictures Animation, and the pacing of the film is such that it flies by. No, I may not consider Peter Rabbit a true respectful Potter adaptation … but I like it all the same, despite the warts and the dumb stuff.

The Emoji Movie (2017)

The Emoji Movie (2017)

(On Cable TV, February 2018)  After seeing the critical savaging received by The Emoji Movie (“One of the Worst Movies of All-Time” ran a typical piece), I was pretty sure that approaching the film with sufficiently lowered expectations would be enough to ensure an average viewing experience. But despite a few mildly interesting moments, The Emoji Movie turns out to be just as bad as the critical consensus determined. Part of it has to do with an instinctual rejection of a fad bandwagon: While emojis have their place and are not going anywhere, The Emoji Movie is as instantly dated as any film can be, making obvious references to contemporary businesses, current technology and social mores of the moment. It would have been incomprehensible five years ago, and is likely to feel unbearably dated five years from now. But let’s not pretend that flash-in-the-pan prejudice can solely account for the film’s bad impression. The nonsense world building also has much to do with it—the film is bad enough without any technological knowledge (I’m not sure the screenwriters understand the definition of a firewall), but the metaphors (trolls inside the phone?) don’t make sense even for non-technological audiences and the inner contradictions become even worse throughout the film. The Emoji Movie is also terrifyingly lazy in its plot development and thematic concerns, having a character creating an apocalypse and then being congratulated for stopping it. It doesn’t further help that the characters are dull, the jokes are easy and the overall imaginative depth of the film is superficial. Compare this to any Pixar film and you can see how inferior the result is. To be clear: The Emoji Movie is not worth burning down a DVD to prevent it from ever being seen again … but it’s not a good film.

Open Season (2006)

Open Season (2006)

(On TV, July 2017) Classic structure, quick gags and fast action sequences make Open Season exactly like most other contemporary animated movies out there. That can be good or bad depending on your saturation with such movies at the moment. Alas, I’m currently into something of a burn-out phase for average animated movies—Even if they’re good (and most of them are good), I have trouble getting enthusiastic about yet another familiar spin on the same material. So here we have a neurotic pair of bear and a moose trying to survive hunting season in an attempt to get home. By the time the film concludes, it has worked itself up to a confrontation between the entire forest’s animals and human hunters. The jokes are there, the action moves quickly and the voice talents do their best to interest us, but this early Sony Animation production does fall prey to an unrelenting formula. The quality of the animation has lost its lustre since its release, of course, although it remains generally good. Open Season has led to three direct-to-video sequels so far, but if this first film is the best it can get, then there isn’t any compelling reason to seek out the follow-ups.