More dispiritment from PIXAR. This one with director/co-writer Dan Scanlon in magpie mode, cooking up a brotherly Road Trip with ‘borrowed’ elements ranging from DUNGEONS & DRAGONS to SHREK and HARRY POTTER. It’d matter less if he hadn’t used the worst stuff from his sources. So, from POTTER: unlimited get-out-of-jail magic incantations. Danger & suspense Begone! Just as much wrong in the setup: a smorgasbord of fantastic beasts from Days of Yore plopped into modern suburbia where a couple of mismatched teen ‘Elven’ siblings (Kid Nerd; Big Brother Fuck Up) leave Mom behind on a quest to find Dear Dead Dad. Kid #1 too young to have met him; Kid #2 never said a proper goodbye. Naturally, this being PIXAR, there’s technical polish in all departments and an All-Star vocal cast, but the adventures are contrived and the characterizations secondhand stuff. With streaming & pandemic accounting, hard to know just how many people went in on this one (PIXAR films often contingent on how well the one before did), but the film ought to give pause; the creatives have been going to the same well a little too often. More like DreamWorks than PIXAR.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Less ambitious & infinitely cheerier, LUCA/’21 had to skip theatrical release, but this PIXAR-Lite is the modest delight its company ought to have crowed about. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/07/luca-2021.html
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