BEFORE: Maya Rudolph carries over again from "Chuck & Buck" and I'll be focused on animation for the next week. Once I get on this topic it's usually very easy to link films, because the same voice actors tend to turn up again and again, either because they love doing voice-work, or have long-time contracts with the big players, or maybe they just don't feel like traveling to do live-action films. The animation industry should really be taking advantage of the Coronavirus lock-down, while nobody's shooting on location animators can still be drawing, and most voice-actors record in sealed rooms in sound studios anyway, very sterile, or could even record their voices remotely. This should be a boon to the animation industry, but I'm not sure that most studios are even open for business - are Disney and Dreamworks animators working from home? I can confirm that people are doing that in the smaller studios, but I don't know if it works for the big players.
They did change the Academy rules about films requiring a theatrical premiere to qualify for the Oscars this year, and so that means we may be seeing more animated films premiering on Netflix and other streaming services during quarantine, like today's film, which now will be eligible for Best Animated Feature. I'm not saying it deserves to be nominated, just that it will be eligible to qualify. The production company still needs to fill out the paperwork, and the Academy members will still need to stream it and then vote.
THE PLOT: Convinced they'd be better off raising themselves, the Willoughby children hatch a sneaky plan to send their selfish parents on vacation. The siblings then embark on their own high-flying adventure to find the true meaning of family.
AFTER: The Willoughbys are a four-kid family that lives in an old house that's somehow surrounded by skyscrapers, occupying a small, gated-off niche in a very modern city (a concept that feels stolen from an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, where a skyscraper somehow left an undeveloped small space over his rabbit hole). The Willoughbys have a long, proud family history, but for some reason, the current generation of parents has no interest in raising kids, they just want to kiss each other and knit, so they neglect their kids, who have to live in the coal storage room, and only get to eat leftovers from the previous day, and sometimes there are none. OK, right off the bat, this one's coming from a weird place. I've got like three NITPICK POINTS in the opening - like, if they didn't want kids, why did they HAVE kids? Don't they know about birth control? And if they found they didn't like raising the first two kids, then why on earth did they have two more? If you don't like kids, just don't have kids, that's OK in this modern already-overpopulated world. Even if Covid-19 ends up killing off a significant portion of the world's population, that would be terrible, but it would also be something of an opportunity to curtail over-population, give Mother Earth a bit of a break and a chance for nature to recover a bit from the damage we've been doing to it. I guess I'm just an "earth-half-full" kind of guy in the end.
So, rather than run away, or inform any authorities about the terrible conditions they live in, the Willoughby children develop a plan to send their parents on vacation, so they can have a break from them, run their house the way it should be run, maybe get some food in their bellies for a change, plus there's a non-zero chance that their parents could be eaten by a shark, or fall off a mountain while traveling, and then they could live as independent orphans. Clearly it's not a GREAT plan, because the kids have no income, no idea how to cook food, and eventually the government nanny-state would figure out that they'd need to become foster children or something. But it's the plan that they have, so they mock up a travel brochure and place it where their (apparently very suggestible) parents can see it.
NITPICK POINT: The selfish, uncaring parents arrange for a nanny to watch their children while they're on extended vacation. Umm, that doesn't seem like the action that selfish, uncaring parents would do - so, are the parents selfish and uncaring, or are they not? There's a glaring contradiction here. I mean, obviously caring parents would take their kids with them, so the parents still aren't saints by any stretch of the imagination, but at least they took some minimal, basic steps to insure that their children would be cared for in their absence.
See what I mean? Story-wise, this one's all over the place. Characters and story ideas get introduced very quickly, pay off instantly (or sometimes not at all) and then it's on to the next big idea, even if that's contradictory to the last idea, let's fire in THIS direction now. Maybe that's just a reaction to the fact that our world's full of A.D.D. kids now, so there has to be some kind of payoff or big, colorful explosion every three minutes or kids will tune out. Gone are the days of a movie like, say, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" (or "Charlie and..." if you're a millennial) where a plot gets introduced, slowly develops over the course of 90 minutes and pays off at the end. There's a candy factory in this film, too, but it's a wild ride with a baby on a dangerous conveyor belt for about a minute and a half, then whoosh, we're off to something else louder, flashier and more colorful.
They sort of made this same mistake a few years back with "A Series of Unfortunate Events" by trying to pack an entire book series into one frenetic movie, and then somebody realized later that it was just too much too soon, and turned it into an Amazon series, which I think did a little better. Maybe somebody here is angling for a Netflix or a Disney channel series based on the Willoughbys, and that could be a better format for these characters. I'm a bit surprised Netflix didn't turn this into a series straight away, they usually try to turn every project into a series instead of a one-time feature.
Taken individually, many of the ideas seem like bad ideas, though - like a group of kids who want their parents to go on vacation because they might die. OK, they may be bad parents, but by itself, that still sounds like a bad idea to put in a film for kids. If kids learn that people might die while on vacation, isn't that going to make it tough for parents to take their kids on vacation, once we're finally allowed to go on vacation again? Some kids out there are going to become more neurotic and refuse to go to Switzerland or any place with bears or sharks or piranhas just because they saw people getting injured in this film. I can't wait for the class-action lawsuit from the Switzerland Tourism Board.
Other bad ideas - "Hey, we found an abandoned baby, should we call the authorities?" "Nah, let's just leave it on someone else's doorstep, problem solved." Not to mention, "Hey, our parents are trying to sell their house, what should we do?" "Let's design a bunch of dangerous traps to injure all the strangers coming to see the house!" Terrible, terrible ideas for a kid's movie, didn't the studio run this storyline by their own legal department, who could have pointed out the culpability of giving susceptible kids malicious intent? Although I freely admit that many animated films like this one deal with fantastical, impossible subjects on a routine basis - flying airships powered by rainbow candy, for example - they also have to consider that kids may try to replicate in the real world some of the actions and story elements that they see characters doing in movies.
There is a positive message about adoption and blended families, and an acknowledgement that not every set of parents is necessarily "good" at parenting. I imagine that may be a revelation to some children, and maybe a depiction of fictional selfish parents may cause some kids to see their own parents in a different light - but arranging the death of one's parents (through travel?) should never, ever, be on the table, being orphaned should probably not be portrayed as preferable to having alive parents, and showing that calling child protection services is a terrible idea with bad consequences could conceivably prevent some impressionable children from making that call to get the very real help that they need. Not every kid who finds a way to get free from their abusive or neglectful parents is going to be lucky enough to find loving surrogate parents willing to adopt them, as seen here, so finding a better way to correct the problem at hand should be encouraged over, "Hey, let's encourage our parents to climb a tall mountain, where they'll probably freeze to death!"
I'm left scratching my head over this one, I don't know how this story got cleared for kids, even though it's told humorously, I'm not sure that all young kids understand "dark humor", and therefore this story's not just weird, it seems very dangerous. If the "Peter Rabbit" movie could get in trouble just for encouraging kids to fight back against a bully by exposing him to something he's allergic to, where's the backlash against this film, with its suggestion to "kill the bad parents"? Umm, they realize that parents are the ones who buy tickets for kids to see movies, right? And they also pay for Netflix subscriptions? Any bad parents out there who don't have a sense of humor aren't going to like this one, and I'm already waiting for the scandal to break.
Also starring the voices of Will Forte (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Alessia Cara, Terry Crews (last seen in "Sorry to Bother You"), Martin Short (last seen in "Love, Gilda"), Jane Krakowski (last seen in "Adult Beginners"), Seán Cullen, Ricky Gervais (last seen in "Special Correspondents"), Brian Drummond, Nancy Robertson, Colleen Wheeler (last seen in "Tully").
RATING: 4 out of 10 balls of yarn
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