That being said, even by DreamWorks standards, the celebrities in this go-round are especially awful, and the music cues particularly distracting. It's unfortunate, because the bones of a stronger film are there. It looks pretty good: favoring a calm, pastel color palette mixed with soft lines and an old-fashioned, squishy approach to character animation, all of which goes a long way to mitigating what could easily be a grim and bleak scenario. The character design is a bit questionable, particularly the humans, but humans have been the Achilles' heel of DreamWorks/PDI animated features for as long as they've existed, and the ones in Home are no more stiff and soullessly robotic than the ones in Megamind or Turbo, and quite a great deal less so than the shuffling corpses of the Shrek films. The production design, meanwhile, is downright enticing, based as it is on an alien culture made up entirely of circles and curves, leading to plenty of smooth surfaces for the eye to glide around.
A pity, then, that Home ends up centering its lovely, if a bit simplistic world (it feels more than slightly like a collection of baby toys given life) on two of the worst performances in the annals of DreamWorks - the studio that has sucked every molecule of distinguishing personality from the voices of such diverse actors as Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Michelle Pfeiffer, Ryan Reynolds, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, and Tina Fey. There's quite a wide range of talent represented by those names, but all of them are better than Jim Parsons, noted for his role on one of contemporary television's most obnoxious comedies, and Rihanna, a pop singer noted for not being an actor at all (what she was up to in Battleship I shall not dignify with the rich history that attains to the word "acting"). To be strictly fair, Parsons's performance collapses as least as much because of the wretched things screenwriters Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember have arranged for him to say as because of the choices he made in saying them, but in both cases, the effect is about the same: it takes only a few lines to grow tired of both leads and their characters, and that leaves an awful lot of movie to spend in the company of a deeply unpleasant pair of protagonists.
The hastily pencilled-in backstory - treated infinitely better in last year's prologue short film-cum-stealth trailer Almost Home - is that a race of five-legged purple aliens about a meter or less in height, the Boov, have colonised Earth as part of their longstanding strategy of running like hell across the universe to stay away from a much more powerful species called the Gorg. Our story takes place on the very day that the Boov, having shunted all the humans on the planet to a reservation in the Australian desert, are ready to take residence in the vacated human habitations of the rest of the world. Naturally enough, in this species that fetishises conformity and impersonal behavior, one and only one Boov is a happy, optimistic fuck-up, and his name is Oh (Parsons). Oh will teach us many things over the course of the movie, the chief one of which is that the children's film plot where a main character doesn’t fit into his repressive society because he’s accident-prone and non-specifically "different" isn't getting any damn fresher. But anyway, Oh manages to cross paths with Gratuity "Tip" Tucci (Rihanna), perhaps the only human who didn't end up captured and sent to Australia, and who has since focused on tracking her missing mother (Jennifer Lopez, turning in a perfectly fine and completely anonymous performance). Along for the ride is Tip's curly-tailed cat Pig, who is, in fact, one of our better cartoon cats of recent vintage, and a clear argument in Home's favor.
The scenario and world Home creates beg for a more interesting story than the latest in an infinite chain of stories where two outcasts bond despite one of them being criminally annoying (I have not read the book by Adam Rex upon which the film was based, The True Meaning of Smekday, but I gather it to be that more interesting story). And even that musty old cliché deserves better than what Parsons and Rihanna throw at it: Parsons managing to be cloyingly sweet and horrifically smug simultaneously, while stressing all the lame comic awkwardness of the tortured Yoda-ese that the writers have whipped up for him. Impressively, it never recedes into the background, no matter how much we hear of it; every new line is a fresh hell. Rihanna, at least, is just vacant; flagrantly miscast as a 12-year-old with what must be a two-pack-a-day smoking habit in order to have such a low voice, the singer speaks lines that she twists into things that absolutely sound like what happens when the director says "you're mad! you think that something is funny!", so at the very least, she correctly indicates what our emotional response is meant to be, even if the rote way she gets there makes it inordinately hard to have that response. The biggest problem is that there are points where actual Rihanna songs are played diegetically in the movie, and Rihanna singing and Rihanna talking sound exactly the same, which raises the distracting possibility that this throaty tween is also a major pop star, or maybe that she just has a tape of herself that she listens to in the car. Neither of these possibilities answer the unforgivable writing conceit that her name is Gratuity and her nickname is Tip, but I can at least imagine that kind of affectation from a pop star in the real world. Incidentally, listening to Rihanna forces Oh to discover that Boov have an irresistible tendency to dance that they never indulge in, and if the movie seems to turn into a Doomsday countdown to a random film-ending dance party at this point, congratulations on knowing your animation studios.
Oh and Tip being such unendurable traveling companions, Home is fairly well doomed as an entertaining story. The writing isn't horrible for DreamWorks - potty jokes are kept to a minimum and pop culture references are limited mostly to a tedious pun on "Busta Lime" that the writers love so much that they keep having characters within the film laugh at it, even ones who have no in-world justification for having heard of Busta Rhymes - and the story is boring and predictable down to the smallest beats, but not meaningfully harmful. It's a tragedy that the film wastes Steve Martin on a small comic role as the Boov leader, but it's not like he was trying to do anything interesting or funny with the part. So it is, really and truly, a very ordinary film in almost all respects; but those leads! They're as ordinary as dental surgery, and more than enough to turn a simple, straightforward kiddie comedy with some pretty design and more fun animation than I'd have expected from this company into a gnashing grind.
5/10
Oh, her voice is Rihanna! I watched the trailer the other day, and couldn't figure out why she sounded so terrible and off-putting.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about the cat! I got a free poster of the film upon buying a ticket, and I love how the rhythm of Oh's ears flows upward toward Pig's tail. I actually thought Tip and Mom were wonderfully expressive, but the human extras - I agree with you - totally wooden. This actually has Dreamworks' most inspired character design (arguably, the Croods does, too, but I have a love/hate feeling toward it).
ReplyDeleteToo bad its not Dreamworks' most inspired movie. Which is frutrating because while I want the studio to survive, I don't want any financial success of this film to encourage Dreamworks to stick to its old habits: gimmicky celebrity, rehashed formulas, and that signature dance party! I know you feel mildly favorable toward Rise of the Guardians and Mr. Peabody and Sherman, but would you agree they were a step in the right direction in terms of creative risk?
gimmicky celebrity casting that is.
ReplyDeleteIt boggles my mind how DreamWorks have so consistently failed to understand what makes Pixar successful.
ReplyDelete"actually has Dreamworks' most inspired character design (arguably, the Croods does, too, but I have a love/hate feeling toward it)"
ReplyDeleteI'm right there with you on The Croods. Like, I'm glad they pushed themselves, but I wish the results were a little more non-hideous.
I'd also put the dragons from the How to Train... movies up there, and the cast of Rise of the Guardians, though with the same caveat that I admire the impulse more than the results.
And "mildly favorable" is maybe a lot too generous in describing my thoughts towards Mr. Peabody & Sherman. "Not filled with rage" is closer to the mark. Whether it's a step in the right direction creatively is hard to say; it's still ultimately betting on a nostalgia property. Guardians was absolutely a step in the right direction.
Andy- It's weird, right? It's not like Pixar's formula isn't really easy to figure out.
Even technologically, DreamWorks is only lagging a little bit behind them these days. There's no reason the people who made The Croods shouldn't have been able to make an Up.
Andy and Tim,
ReplyDeleteIn the annals of Disney history, Katzenberg is notorious for taking over during the production of The Black Cauldron in which he tried to "edit" the picture (something that makes sense in live action but not with animation footage).
Point being, there are probably a lot of management issues at Dreamworks that stymies the best work of their creative employees. Generally speaking, all animation studios do, but keep in mind that, again, it was Katzenberg's idea to release 5 animated films for every 3 year span, an ambition no other major studio took on and given the fact that DW doesn't have a lesser studio brand property (ala Disneytoon). I speculate that such ambition rushes development, and given the studio's mass layoffs of late, I wonder what creative human capital was lost.
And, although this may not directly relate to creative output, Peabody, Penguins, and Home all cost north of 100 mil while Despicable Me 2, Lego Movie, and Sponge Bob were profitable with half such budgets.
So the hope for us animation fans is that DW's precarious times forces them to make some strategical changes that ultimately lead to films that realize the studio's potential and, of course, rival Pixar. The dread, 2nd to the studio collapsing altogether, is that DW finds its way again churning out crap.
And so as not to end on a sour note, I hope Home will throw the studio a raft, and the anticipated 3rd installments of Panda and Dragon (or at least movies like the originals of said films) will help the studio and the animation industry soar.
I'd love to know how that wage-fixing situation that came to life a little while back might play into that as well. It's certainly not going to make artists try their best or work their hardest when that kind of bullshit goes on. And yet it doesn't seem to have hindered Pixar in any way.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, to your greater point, I think it's clear that there's a lot of meddling. No way do their movies all end up so samey without some kind of executive mandate.
As someone who grew up in his hometown (some 20 years after he was born), and was thus doubly confounded by the praise he got abroad as well as the near-adulation my teachers and classmates had for him, I find the Parsons-bashing here quite gratifying.
ReplyDeleteI'm actually really unsure as to whether the success of Dreamworks Animation is good for the medium - and not simply out of a distaste for the quality of their output. I like that they give american animators a reliable job rather than just the freelancing they've come to expect in television, but thus far it seems to me that the healthiest thing for animation has been decentralization. Whenever a single company stops defining what mainstream animation "is" then a lot of exciting work starts popping up. In the 70s we had the avant garde boom fronted by bakshi, the 80s we had don bluth (who really dropped the ball, but at least proved the potential viability of alternate routes), and since pixar's been slipping there's really been a huge uptick in creative diversity.
ReplyDeleteI'm certainly not rooting for Dreamworks to die, but for it to continue simply struggling seems like it could be quite beneficial.
Also Parsons is pretty repellant in BBT, and seems like a hugely unpleasant choice for his role in this movie, but overall he's a perfectly capable actor who gets strangely praised for (and thus boxed into) work that he's really unappealing in.
ReplyDeleteI'm more watching this.
ReplyDeleteI am now regretting many life choices that have led to this.