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SMALLFOOT
Director: Karey Kirkpatrick Cast: The voices of Channing Tatum, James Corden, Zendaya, Common, LeBron James, Danny DeVito, Gina Rodriguez, Yara Shahidi, Ely Henry, Jimmy Tatro, Patricia Heaton, Jack Quaid MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:36 Release Date: 9/28/18 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 27, 2018 Smallfoot begins as a simple but effective satire about how rigid belief systems can prevent its adherents from seeing the truth and real beauty of the wide world. It becomes more as it progresses, though, forcing us to consider that, maybe, such falsehoods are essential, if not for understanding the world, then for basic survival. It's a wide world out there, yes, but it's also a dangerous one, filled with ideas that incomprehensible, things that will make one despair, and other entities that might kill a thing, if that thing is something they don't understand. Despite what this sounds like, the movie is a computer-animated comedy, with touches of music and a clever premise, about a group of yetis who live on an isolated mountaintop in the Himalayas and know of nothing beyond what their eyes can see. They've established a bunch of beliefs, which make little sense, and rules, which prevent their fellow yetis from questioning any of those beliefs. We assume it's ignorance at first. After all, what does a yeti—even one that's part of collective that has developed language and a functioning society—know of anything beyond its mountain home? We later think the laws might be some malicious conspiracy for some yetis to maintain power. It turns out that the beliefs and rules are far more pragmatic, protective, and understanding of the nature of another sentient lifeform. Yetis have to look out for themselves, because another species has spent a long time calling them abominable monsters. We laugh at these yetis and their creeds, because they are quite silly. The mountain came out of the backend of a great yak, and it sits atop the backs of giant mammoths, which are just below the clouds surrounding the "base" of the mountain. When asked what's below the mammoths (a reasonable question), our yeti hero Migo (voice of Channing Tatum) says that it's all mammoths—great pillars of ancient beasts. What all of those mammoths are standing upon is never asked, of course. One wonders if the Stonekeeper (voice of Common), who wears a cloak of stones that have all of the yetis' rules and beliefs etched on them, even knows. The sun is a big, illuminated snail that slowly moves across the sky, and it must be summoned every morning by a gong. Migo comes from a family of gong-ringers, who, for generations, have launched themselves at the gong with a mechanical sling, aimed themselves head first at it, and developed notably flattened skulls from years of work (except for a certain uncle, who had a strange theory about a mallet). Migo's father Dorgle (voice of Danny DeVito) is the current gong-ringer, and Migo is looking forward to taking over the vital duty soon. The plot begins when Migo has an encounter with a plane and its human pilot. A human, according to unofficial yeti lore, is called a "smallfoot," but such creatures do not exist, according to the literally-written-in-stone rules of the community. Facing a crisis of faith, Migo asserts that he saw a smallfoot, which means at least one of the laws is wrong, and is banished from the village. A quartet of eccentric yetis, led by the Stonekeeper's intelligent and curious daughter Meechee (voice of Zendaya), decide to help Migo find a human to prove that he's right. In between the satire and the later, bigger questions of director Karey Kirkpatrick and Clare Sera's screenplay, there's an amusing tale of Migo's adventures in the world, as he makes his way to find a human. The human is Percy (voice of James Corden), the host of a failing nature TV show who hears the pilot's story about seeing a yeti. Percy's plan is to fake a yeti encounter, but of course, he ends up face-to-face with a real one. The film possesses a lot of that good, old-fashioned carton logic, in which physics are a matter of perspective (Migo doesn't plummet from the mountaintop until he realizes that his rope has been cut) and monumental misunderstandings occur because a character can only think of one thing. For an unreasonable amount of time, Percy is convinced that Migo is just his assistant in a yeti costume, and Migo trying to warm up the human on a spit over a fire doesn't change Percy's mind that he's the yeti's dinner. It doesn't help that the each character only hears gibberish coming out of the other's mouth. The film's humor is wacky and good-natured, avoiding the cheap laughs and, instead, developing the jokes from its characters and the premise of its world. There are a few decent songs, too, although they are orchestrated more for show and less for accentuating the sometimes subversive meaning of the lyrics (Migo's introductory song is filled with plenty of unintentional barbs at the yeti's isolated community, but they're drowned out by the music and the sights of the yetis at work). One "borrows" Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure" (and has a good punch line, offered by a mustachioed karaoke singer), and another has Meechee and Migo taking a tour of the universe as they might know it. The best has the Stonekeeper explaining the real history of yetis and humans, set against stone carvings and a great machine within the mountain. The truth of this situation is more complicated than it first appears, and Smallfoot doesn't evade the complexities and gloom of its eventual revelations. It offers some wisdom and hope about seemingly irreconcilable conflicts, which isn't something one would expect from an animated film about a group of singing yetis. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for some action, rude humor, and thematic elements)
