BEFORE: I snuck out to see this one on a weekday morning, because I knew that the following week I'd be watching a couple of films with Hugh Jackman in them, and also I wanted to extend my chain between Mother's Day and "X-Men: Dark Phoenix".
I half-dedicated this year to animator Will Vinton, and the studio that made this film USED to be called Will Vinton Studios - and that's a studio I used to (sort of) work for, so I do want to support their efforts. BUT by taking an advance look at the theater schedules on the IMDB, it seemed like I nearly waited too long, this film was about to vanish from most of the NYC theaters it was booked into, leaving just one screen up on 86th St., and I rarely get to the Upper East Side. So I had to get up early on the last day this film was screening on 42nd St., and catch a film before heading to work at noon. In a perfect year (so far) where linking is concerned, I hate to mess with my time stream and watch films out of sequence, but I've sat on my reviews for a week or two before. Whatever maintains the chain right now is considered fair game.
So, Hugh Jackman carries over from "Being Elmo" if I've planned this right.
THE PLOT: Mr. Link recruits explorer Sir Lionel Frost to help find his long-lost relatives in the fabled valley of Shangri-La. Along with adventurer Adeline Fortnight, this trio of explorers travel the world to help their new friend.
AFTER: It's another one of those thematic vergences, really, where several animation studios get the idea to work on films with similar plot-lines. Remember "Antz" and "A Bug's Life"? Or "Finding Nemo" and "A Shark's Tale"? Or just two years ago when "Sing", "Zootopia" and "The Secret Life of Pets" all came out in the same summer? Then a few years before that, it was wall-to-wall penguins with films like "Happy Feet", "Surf's Up" and "Madagascar" released by different studios, fairly close together in time. Now, either the studios all have spies at the other studios, or they're all watching each other's press releases very closely and trying to capitalize on each other's ideas, or perhaps there's some secret trend-followers in a weird corner of the internet who are paying attention to everyone's likes and dislikes, and they send the word out to the studios, like "We think talking animals in cities are going to be BIG BIG BIG this year" or "We believe that movies about fairies and trolls are going to dominate the fall release schedule, so you'd better get working on one!"
Then again, maybe it's all just a bunch of coincidences. But then, how does one explain why there were suddenly so many movies about Sasquatches and/or Yetis coming to market? First there was "Smallfoot" from Warner Bros. Animation, then this one from Laika Studios, and today I saw a trailer for "Abominable", from Dreamworks Animation. OK, I guess last year there was also a Belgian animated kids film called "Son of Bigfoot", but it looks horrible. But WHY do we need four kids movies about Bigfoots/Yetis, when I'm not even sure that we needed ONE of them? And why do they all have to come out so close together?
Early in the film, there's a big story problem - Lionel finds the Sasquatch so quickly! Once he finally gets to the right trail in Oregon, it takes him about 5 seconds to spot one. Of course, that Sasquatch WANTED to be found, but that's a bit beside the point. This could have been a major part of the story, the hunt for Bigfoot, and it's just dismissed like it's nothing. People have been looking for Bigfoot for years (OK, at least going out in the woods and drinking and fooling around and PRETENDING to look for Bigfoot) and this leads the audience to think that it's THAT easy, you just go out in the woods and spot one. I think even with the knowledge that the creature wanted to be found, there could have been more dramatic tension created with a longer search.
Then, shortly after Frost and the Sasquatch join forces, it's right off to the next adventure, to track down the Yetis in Shangri-La, because they MIGHT be related to the Sasquatch. Dude, we JUST traveled from London to Oregon, in an Indiana-Jones style travel montage, and now we've got to go to where, Tibet? But first we have to stop back in LONDON? This makes no sense, wouldn't it be easier to cross the Pacific and go through the Orient to get to the Himalayas, instead of stopping in London (for NO reason) and then progressing over land by rail? I think a ship leaving from Seattle or San Francisco would be much faster, and the trip would be shorter in overall mileage - I'll have to double-check this, of course. But a stagecoach from the Pacific Northwest to NYC seems like that would take 2 or 3 weeks, at least, just to get on a boat in NYC? They could have been halfway across the Pacific by then! I have to call a NITPICK POINT on the travel geography here.
Of course, stopping back in London puts them back in conflict with Frost's nemesis, Lord Piggot-Dunceby at the Explorer's Club. And pretending to get on the train to San Francisco enable them to shirk the villainous Willard Stenk, who'd been trailing them. But this seems like a bit of a smokescreen just to cover up the fact that the itinerary doesn't make much sense. Plus, SO much of this movie is just traveling from place to place, I wish more could have been devoted to things happening in the major locations. Most of this becomes, "OK, we're here, now quickly, we have to to to THERE..."
(ASIDE: I've been watching Season 2 of "American Gods" on the Starz Channel, and that show suffers from a similar problem. Sure, it's kind of exciting to see Odin re-uniting the Old World Gods to rally his forces against the threat of the New Gods, but when that boils down to, "Now we have to drive to Cairo, Illinois" followed by "Now we have to drive to Topeka, Kansas" and "OK, now down to New Orleans" then you realize that 90% of each episode is driving somewhere, with very little happening in each city upon arrival. They're really stretching it out, trying to turn a one-volume book into a 3-season series - if you ask me, this story should have been told in ONE season, eight episodes, tops. End of ASIDE.)
I'm sure this is probably better than "Smallfoot" or either of the other Bigfoot/Yeti films released in the last & upcoming year, but it's a long way from "Coraline" or "Kubo and the Two Strings", produced by the same studio. It's not even on a par with "Paranorman", unfortunately, all because the story is just so weak - it's basically not much more than a travelogue. There some fascinating animation work done on a ship at sea that's tilting so much on the waves that it's nearly at a 90-degree angle, so the characters run through the ship on the walls, not the deck, but that's about it. The collapsing ice bridge near the end can't really hold up, because it's just the same gag over and over again, to the point of ridiculousness.
Also starring the voices of Zach Galifianakis (last seen in "A Wrinkle in Time"), Zoe Saldana (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Stephen Fry (last seen in "I.Q."), Timothy Olyphant (last seen in "Snowden"), Emma Thompson (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)"), Amrita Acharia, Matt Lucas (last heard in "Sherlock Gnomes"), David Walliams, Ching Valdes-Aran, Humphrey Ker, Adam Godley (last heard in "The BFG"), Neil Dickson, Ian Ruskin, Matthew Wolf, Darren Richardson, Alan Shearman, Jack Blessing, Richard Miro, Jaswant Dev Shrestha
RATING: 5 out of 10 bowls of yak stew
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