Stablemates: Non-Pony Netflix Animated Films · 1:32pm Oct 11th, 2023
After seeing the G5 movie, I was curious about the Netflix company it kept. Results below...
Pictured: Possibly the Mark of the Devil
Blog Number 232: "You're Gonna Fit Right In" Edition
When I said A New Generation came across as "middle of the pack", I originally meant in terms of pony media as a whole, at least in my experience. Not as good as the best, far better than the worst, neither breaking past its flaws nor dragging itself down beyond redemption. Well, turns out that's also an accurate summary of its position among the Netflix animated movie roster.
Not gonna be a deep analysis. I got a sample of films I've seen, and I'm gonna give overall impressions and a couple of notes of interest. Note that this counts Netflix-exclusive films, not animated films that just happen to have found their way onto Netflix.
Also: Not an exhaustive list, by any means. Quite apart from the fact I haven't seen all the animated films Netflix has to offer, writing out this much is taking it out of me at the moment. It hasn't been a great couple of months.
OK, here we go!
Back to the Outback (2021)
In terms of its didactic goal, Back to the Outback flat-out doesn't work. The moral boils down to "don't judge a book by its cover", which is a sensible enough warning against superficial judgementalism. Applying it to animals that can and will kill you is about as opposite to sensible as you can get. Hey, kids! If you fall in the water, don't worry about that giant crocodile swimming towards you! It's here to save you! Crocs are basically scaly dolphins!
I haven't even gotten to the part about how the deadly heroes are redesigned to be as chibi and cute as possible, which kinda defeats the purpose of the whole exercise.
Get past that hurdle, though, and you'll be rewarded with... a decent enough movie. Despite its lack of logic, I still enjoyed what it was trying to do: taking animals that are usually treated as evil killing machines and giving them mundane personalities. How many movies can say they have a taipan as a hero? The movie's insistence that a venomous snake can be as worthy of anthropomorphism as a cuddly mammal warms my reptile-loving heart, and Maddie herself is a serpentine sweetheart. I give it points just for the novelty.
There are a few surprises thrown into an otherwise unremarkable road trip adventure to give it an identity (even though one, the Ugly Secret Society, never stops making less and less sense the more you think about it). The reveal behind the human hunting them down is arguably the best, and for someone introduced as the typical Awesome Aussie (side note: the cast is full of Australian talent), Chaz easily has the best arc in the movie. Heck, at least the U.S.S. (yes, they call it that in-universe) provides a random excuse to throw in more "dangerous but not really" animals into the mix, and I'll leave it up to your imagination which one was my favourite.
(Regrettably, the film does dip into cheap toilet humour once or twice, despite managing fairly well on more pointed character-based comedy, silly enough shenanigans, some so-bad-it's-good ideas, and the occasional flash of wit. Dung beetles are involved. For the record, I really don't like this sort of thing in movies, much less family-friendly ones.)
I can't in good conscience recommend this as a great movie, or a good one on anything below the surface. But if you don't mind a broken premise (and that's a big ask), this I at least found to be a pleasant enough way to spend an hour and a half. It certainly does enough to distinguish itself. Kudos alone for the chutzpah: now, if you could do a few things differently next time...
Gnome Alone (2018)
The only movie here which I think is outright bad. Admittedly, I skipped some that looked kinda "eh" on the outside, but I wasn't sure what to expect from Exhibit G, so I gave it the benefit of the doubt. And it's not like the film's a torture device or anything. It simply turned out to be a big, dull dud.
What little "heart" the movie has centres around Chloe, who is moved around the US by her mother's job, the nature of which escapes me but which requires her to be away from her daughter for long periods at the nearest airport. Chloe, aided and abetted by modern technology - don't worry, this isn't a plot point, it's just there until it's not - is very obviously not taking the constant uprooting well, but she hides this from her mother, and literally the only one of two scenes I cared about involved her crying as soon as her mother left the room.
If you're reminded of Inside Out here, then you're already halfway towards why I didn't click with this movie. Inside Out was a deep dive into Riley's mentality, arguably moreso than it was an adventure movie about Joy figuring out why Sadness is the way she is. In a structure similar to Pixar's Up, the first few minutes build up the best of the protagonist's life before we see it come crumbling down and watch them try to reclaim what's now permanently beyond their reach. The colourful adventure on top of that ends up being more a secret allegory of their life (admittedly harder to spot in Up than in the much more explicit Inside Out), so they get a chance to come to terms with it by proxy whilst we get a colourful adventure full of kinda loveably dumb ideas (talking dogs and dream movie studios, for example) into the bargain.
Pictured: A very subtle form of grief counselling.
Aiming for a bar that high is a bit much, but Gnome Alone can't even pass its own basic hurdles. On the one hand, Chloe's story depends on her mother - who's absent most of the movie and is just ineffectually nice throughout - and on her ability to make friends - which is so railroaded that you can guess the winner between her dorky nerd neighbour Liam and the cookie-cutter Alpha B***h Brittany about two seconds after meeting them, despite the movie spending way too much time playing coy. Between these threads, you'll learn hardly anything about our central hero. There isn't much to make any of the rest of the cast stand out either, so the "reheated leftover" feeling is especially acute.
And on the other hand, the story is about a bunch of Toy-Story-style gnomes who fight tiny purple Mike Wazowski's from another dimension. With green paint guns. They're called Troggs. They will cause the apocalypse.
Firstly, what!? As worldbuilding goes, this has diddly-squat to do with any depiction of gnomes I'm familiar with. The rest of the screenplay can't achieve more than turning them into some secret agent society, except they're still basically gnomes with occasional green thumb powers, so it's a worst-of-both-worlds situation where the cool sci-fi side feels lame, whereas the twinkle-in-the-eye fantasy side is smothered by interdimensional technobabble to disguise the fact this is "The Trouble with Tribbles" again.
The Troggs get more consistent worldbuilding, and that alternates clumsily between "annoying little imps" and "EVERYONE WILL DIE IF WE DON'T STOP THESE THINGS PRONTO". It's a cheap mishmash of kiddified shenanigans that we can't take seriously and overblown stakes that want to be taken seriously, and it doesn't even begin to pay off till the relatively trippy climax.
Secondly, all this has basically nothing to do with the other story. Except that the plot kicks off when Chloe removes an unprotected world-protecting MacGuffin and - in a spectacular display of bad judgement - gives it to the obvious Alpha B***h, who then proceeds to waste our time on a petty subplot that is easily the point where your patience with the movie will be tested. They don't mesh in a coherent way, though, and the movie's at anything like its best when it stops trying to square the circle and throws us into a bog-standard "kill the enemy for good" final confrontation(s). And even that's a bit eye-rolling, between the damn mistimed scatological humour and the fact that "Mega-Trogg" is not going down as the name to spread fear into the hearts of enemies.
Long story short, everything falls flat. The family drama falls flat. The friendship testing falls flat. The weird mishmash of high stakes and kiddie filler both fall flat. The only recommended skip on this list.
You are a sad, strange little movie, and you have my pity. Farewell.
Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio (2022)
I find it hard to judge this heavily personal masterpiece, between the cold black admiration I have for its unflinching horror and corruption, and the far more confused question of whether or not I enjoyed any of it. The only thing I can say for sure is that this has Pan's Labyrinth fingerprints all over it, and Guillermo Del Toro has a hell of a directorial vision.
Forget the cutesy, toned-down Disney version: this film makes no bones about the ugly side of its characters and the world they make around themselves. As per the predecessor (Pan's Labyrinth), the film is set during the interbellum when World War One was a bitter memory and World War Two was riding in on the back of the Italian fascist movement. None of it's window-dressing either: Geppetto's son Carlo dies after the first few cruelly ironic minutes, killed by a plane's bomb right when you're wondering if you started the wrong movie, and a no-pretense-about-it militant fascist is a major community figure throughout, one who gives us the child soldier training camp replacement for Pleasure Island. Heck, Mussolini makes a cameo. This is not a family film, unless your family consists entirely of morbid historians.
In this painful context, the ethics of the Pinocchio story are turned on their head, and in the modern anti-authoritarian age, all for the better. Instead of a straightforward lesson on pious obedience and being a good little boy, the film goes from "parents are people too" humanization to outright saying "your elders are not your betters; some of them really are exploitative bastards". Pinocchio himself is a rebuke of his father figure Geppetto, whose grief inspired him to carve the crude puppet in a drunken, rage-filled attempt to get his son back, which thereafter becomes a reliable source of conflict between the two as Geppetto treats him as a Carlo replacement instead of as an individual.
Not just our central cast come out with a tarnish, either. Count Vulpe - our Stromboli for this evening - is a charming conman too wrapped up in his own myth-making to spare a crumb of sympathy for anyone else, and doesn't even bother with the pretense after a while. It's especially heavy-handed in the fascist youth training camp scene, where another father figure is present, and the one redeeming spark of Geppetto's fatherly concern is completely absent in this one. You can practically hear Del Toro sternly shouting through the screen that this kind of brutal, cultish hivemindery was ultimately what got millions of people killed.
The unflinching time stamp hits other aspects of the story as well, sometimes directly - "Monstro" appearing amid a mine-laden sea - sometimes purely in the grimmified tone. Stop-motion woodcuts and an uncanny valley approach to character design match the ugly, dated aspects of the plot. Pride of place goes to our wish-granting fairy, which looks more like an unholy cross between primordial depictions of elves pre-Shakespeare and the Biblical angels - the abomination ones with too many eyes in all the wrong places.
In a strikingly bold move, the film introduces the idea that Pinocchio - not being a "real" boy - can't actually die, so his "transformation" has more metaphysical consequences than the original. This seems to be all of a one with the grim embracing of what it means to be human - flawed, vulnerable, and potentially beyond hope - and it feels weirdly divorced from the other moral.
As much as this is refreshingly direct and pulls no punches, it's also part of what makes the movie too heavy and disjointed to enjoy fully. Reminder that this has to sit next to a childishly overeager puppet, a talking cricket, a monster fish, and a bunch of songs that hardly ever feel like they belong in such a movie - with one, Vulpe's, actively feeling as though it was made up on the spot, and not in a way that suggests he's any good at improv.
What I'm trying to say is that this is an "almost" movie for me. It's almost a great political-historical polemic, except it has to drag in the fantasy elements of the original. It's almost an intense family drama about dealing with grief and mortality, except the best material's too front-loaded for that and it's ignored for chunks of the movie. It's almost a bitterly funny coming-of-age adventure story about a childlike puppet way out of his depth, except he's occasionally too bratty for the naive innocence to land. It's almost an unapologetically brutal call to carpe diem, except that the world's real life is so depressingly horrible its own afterlife seems like a better bet by comparison.
I don't think it's a bust or anything. Especially those last few points, I feel like my memory's accentuating the negative, if not flat-out forgetting the positives. All I know is that I have confused, conflicting impressions from watching this movie, and while I absolutely recommend it, I also absolutely suspect it'd not be a happy time for a bunch of recommendees.
So... if you liked Pan's Labyrinth, go right ahead.
Klaus (2019)
Unlike these other movies which I watched recently, I saw this one way, way back. I will also randomly interject at this point and say that I'm a big fan of the Discworld book series, with caveats and subclauses here and there. And the best way I can describe Klaus is as a Christmas-themed version of Discworld's Going Postal.
To clarify: in both stories, a selfish sleaze is given one last chance when he ends up crossing the wrong authority figure: go to this forsaken dump of a place and revitalize its postal service, or consider your life over. For ulterior motives, the selfish sleaze plays along, only to find the forsaken dump to be even more forsaken and dumpish than he'd first feared. Gradually, he learns more about the odd obsessions of the natives, picks up a spiky love interest, collects clues and angles of attack here and there, finally bringing them all together as part of a self-serving scheme, but also starting to morph from a slick con artist into someone with the first few prickles of conscience, to the point that his response to the first major setback is to throw in all his chips and raise the stakes.
And... I can't go further without hitting major spoilers, though I think you can guess Jesper's character arc already.
As far as I'm concerned, this uncanny overlap was a welcome surprise, though on balance Going Postal did far more unconventional things with its setup (not least of all challenging the idea that the con artist Moist von Lipwig ever genuinely turns over a new leaf in anything like a straightforward fashion). But they both share a cheerfully macabre delight in putting an amusingly selfish jerk in situations where he's either utterly bewildered or on the receiving end of an arse-kicking buttock-prodding contest.
It's also a simple pleasure to see the slow development of the dingy grey world as it is transformed piecemeal into something jaunty and exciting, and to go from mocking the "hero's" just desserts by proxy to feeling more and more invested in the dream he's selling, to the point where the high stakes are part of the fun.
On its own terms, though, Klaus has a few extra goodies to add to its nice list. Firstly, it's CHRISTMAS!
I love how the mythos of the modern Christmas celebration are reimagined as on-the-fly adaptations Jesper (the aforementioned amusingly selfish jerk) makes to keep his scam going, both because of the irony of a wholesome, magical Christmas originating from such mundane, mercenary motives, and also because it's nice to get an oblique nod to Sinterklaas into the bargain. Especially the surprisingly dour and introverted take on Santa Claus, the eponymous Klaus himself, but I dare not spoil all of the surprises here.
Also, there's a Saimi girl who speaks purely in her own native tongue throughout, and she is precious, like the Little Match Girl meets Cindy-Lou Who but you can't understand a word she's saying.
Secondly, the film is gorgeous, with a blend of CGI and traditional animation that calls to mind the unique Paperman short Disney created around the time of Wreck-It Ralph. This striking combo (I think this one errs more on the 2D side than Paperman did, though given it's clearly got the mark of Disney animation all over it, that is a bias worthy of bias) combines with the saturated colour scheme to match the story's progress alongside the gradual rise of Christmas in all its glory. It's professional and pretty, and I will forgive Netflix a lot of sins if it makes ten more of these things.
Thirdly and lastly, for all that it wouldn't fit in the top tier of Disney movies, I think it would comfortably sit alongside their Renaissance-era unconventionals as a worthy stablemate (I'm thinking the ragtag of 90's good-to-great stuff). It has its fun, funny, dramatic moments, and while not terribly ambitious or unpredictable, it has enough goodwill in its unorthodox approach that I'd count Klaus as a definite success.
I commend this movie to any soul who can find it.
The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021)
You can tell this was made by the same double act behind The LEGO Movie. It mocks the very idea of its protagonists being in any way worthy action heroes, throws us a ton of reminders that they kinda suck as a unit, and then - when they get their one good idea - promptly yanks it away as cruelly as possible amid much bright and shiny villainous gloating before some heartfelt drama turns them around enough for a crazy second go that mad libs its way to victory. And it's secretly about daddy issues.
Also, it wants you to meme so hard.
Actually, put like that, it's got Gravity Falls DNA too...
I think it's worth shooting myself in the foot by saying I'm not as crazy about The LEGO Movie as would be par for the consensus. Freaking hilarious movie as it is, I'm far more receptive to the opening two thirds, which indulged gleefully in merciless mockery of the Chosen One narrative, that lazy crutch so benightedly common in big epic stories when the author can't come up with any real qualifications to root for the Schmuck with a Thousand Plates of Plot Armour.
Only there's a last third too, and all that mockery's undone for an about-turn overoptimism and a compromised world-building twist that - clever as it is metatextually - muddies the waters and the stakes way too much for me to feel immersed in the story any longer.
Mitchells has neither the clever metatextual twist, nor the over-optimism. It does have the laughably great villain who steals the show, to its overwhelming credit, as well as cheerfully bumbling robot minions and a critique of authoritarian types. In fact, its Big AI Business finger-wagging over the deliberate obsolescence of faddish tech and careless data mining? That's actually an improvement; it feels more toothy and relevant than generic potshots at perfectionistic control freaks (at least in theory: in practice, it comes across as flavour text to a generic "machines take over the world" plot*).
* This is a problem I had with M3GAN as well, where the focus on the "family drama through technological dehumanization" angle feels divorced from the boilerplate "AI-gone-evil" genre tradition. Can't help but feel like a regression by comparison.
But in some respects, it carries itself as a watered-down LEGO Movie transplanted onto a family sitcom. If that sentence didn't scare you, then so far, so good.
Not a bad family sitcom, despite how obvious it is that only two of the four matter, i.e. Katie and her dad Rick. Her mom Linda mostly slots into the "Women are Wiser" middlemom role, and her brother Aaron is mostly there to give Katie someone to confide in when it's dramatically convenient. They're at least good enough comedic company to spend time with and laugh at, though it tips over into acquired taste here and there: the film's Katie-centric comedy revolves around old meme humour, and if you can't stand meme humour then you cannot haz thiz moovy, coz eet ees EVVERYWARE.
Side note: Aaron the tween boy is voiced by the director Mike Rianda, and Jesus does the "old dude" voice not fit, like, at all.
The gist of it is that this family is dysfunctional. WEIRD, almost proudly so, though such material as "boy likes dinos and gets flustered around girls" and "mom is basically Keeping Up With The Joneses", all comes across as pretty softball weird to me. "Dysfunctional" hits closer to the mark, which fuels both the comedy and the drama as it should, though such things as Rick cancelling Katie's flight to California without her consent - or breaking her laptop via tug-of-war and then making light of it - land more "idiot jackass who's un-self-aware" than "well-intentioned dummy". It's a shame because the eroded goodwill between father and daughter does work here and there; it just runs up against the comedy that wants to work in a more self-aware zany register that tramples across the edges.
Never mind that it all but begs us to ask how an AI capable of rounding up the world's population in a day has this much trouble stopping four idiots in a prehistoric car.
What all this is leading up to is a movie that I found positively entertaining, and definitely visually busy - Katie's meme illustrations, for want of a better term, pop out onto the screen here and there to stamp her individuality on her POV moments, and I liked that artistic touch - with a dramatic backbone that almost but not quite makes the cut. I laughed a lot. I think I cried... once, maybe twice?
It's not bad drama - it has its touching moments - but in terms of making you feel more deeply involved, the film has more success with its hilariously offbeat Max robots - especially two malfunctioning ones who might as well be the movie, really - than with the half of the family that's a smidgen too idiotic to fully sell its earnest dramatic stakes. Which is kinda the same reaction I had to the LEGO Movie.
It's definitely a good, fun movie. It's not the Special, though.
NIMONA (2023)
I...
...LOVE THIS MOVIE!
I probably shouldn't have such an extreme reaction to it. If anything, it's a watered-down adaptation of a much more hardcore graphic novel, and the watering can was filled with the Disney-esque Bowdlerized stuff that exists to make movies more family-friendly. But not by much, given what stayed in this finished film. And you know what? I like family-friendly but not by much. F*** it.
Like Klaus, this has some Disney animation stamps on it, though as far as I can tell, Disney's only real contribution was to buy out the studio and liquidate it. Netflix, in a surprisingly heroic move for an equally villainous organization, saved it like a knight in shining armour, and thank goodness they did, because this movie was a dragon in distress.
Sporting a futuristic medieval look that I cannot fathom why I haven't seen this done before, NIMONA starts without its titular character, which is odd because it is ultimately about its titular character: a mysterious shapeshifting demon gal who relishes in raising Hell - by PG standards, that is, which means she talks about killing people but never actually crosses that line - quickly allies herself with a man who's been branded traitor and murderer for killing the queen at the start of the movie.
The man and our sole hero early on is Ballister Boldheart, a warrior who - unusually - has been plucked from common stock by the queen herself rather than descending from a noble family, and whose determination would have seen him officially knighted on the very day when the murder happens, and who has so obviously been framed and set up by a secret conspiracy, because Nimona is quick to realize he's too noble and goody-goody and stuff to be a true villain. Not that this stops her wanting to join in on the action. It mostly means he has to stop her getting carried away.
In a mark of how willing to screw around with concepts the film is, there's a point partway along where the conspiracy has been revealed at last, and in an ordinary movie, that would mark the climax of the adventure. Except it's too early for that, so the movie pulls out a counter-twist that leads to another twist that unravels yet more secrets in a subdued flashback that should have been hokey as hell, but which genuinely reduced me to tears with how much conviction they sell it, and then they make it even more gut-wrenching when you figure out what's going on in the climax, and good grief do I love the movie for that.
Yes, it does broadly collapse into the cliched "don't judge a book by its cover" moral, but honestly, I think if half of them sold it as well as this one does, it wouldn't be a problem. What's pretty great from the get-go, though, is how the movie splits the difference between Ballister and Nimona: Ballister, who has a class awareness problem into the mix, refuses to accept the label he's been branded with and pushes back at every chance he gets despite how poor his efforts (initially) prove to be.
Whereas Nimona embraces hers and has fun with it, so in a way she ends up incriminating herself via self-fulfilling prophecy. She's coded on that kind of juvenile delinquent that's been told she's got no future, so just rebels against the world and lets her issues run wild, dismissing Ballister's attempts to force himself to play the responsible father figure (even as he's more successfully forced to break laws or screw himself over trying to clear his name).
One more wrinkle added to the mix is Ambrosius, a.k.a. an example of having a gay relationship that actually matters to the plot. While sanded off mightily compared to his graphic novel counterpart (most of his jerkass moments go to another character, who never stops being annoying because of it), Ambrosius is still the guy out to catch former-lover-turned-fugitive Ballister. It's refreshing to see such a romance not simply used as queer-baiting flavour text, but as part of the actual conflict, since the intimate knowledge serves a plot function once or twice during the Javert-like chase.
Plus, Ambrosius can't fully bring himself to believe someone he knew so well would turn traitor, and in the meantime his duty to the Institute keeps pushing him into a role he can't outright ignore. Oh, and he also chopped off Ballister's arm on the day of the queen's death, so there's that awkward bit of darkness hovering over their interactions. He's not a character tour-de-force - frankly, I found him a bit bland on his own - but he's a welcome complication.
True to form, I can't pretend the movie is flawless. The ending didn't quite land for me, with a bad case of being totally unconvinced the movie would follow through with a particular plot point. Still...
...I freaking loved this movie. It's so metal. 😈
I think that'll do for now. Potential candidates for next time include The Sea Beast, Wendell & Wild, The Willoughbys, and Wish Dragon, but if you feel like bringing something up I haven't mentioned here, be my guest.
Till next time! Impossible Numbers, out.
I feel like, if anything, you've sold me on that Pinocchio movie.
5750037
You sure about that? Last I checked, they're still arguing over how to "put a little bit of fucking fairy dust over the bastard." Wild things they may be, I doubt they can cut a 45, much less a 2012.
Between the heavy-hitters and the morbid curiosities, this was an interesting look into some of the bullets Netflix has available for biting into! (And promptly getting lead poisoning from, in some cases.) I've only ever watched the last two of these six — Outback and Gnome were unfamiliar territory and will assuredly remain as such, Klaus got snowed in by a vicious "Save it for the holidays, then forget" cycle, and I skipped Pinnochio out of a confused indignation at the novel's inadvertent adaptation trilogy of 2022 — but perhaps this post was the push I needed to finally watch the better half of those extant four.
As for Mitchells and Nimona, yeah, they're pretty good! …And that's all I have to add about them. For all my yarn-spinning, sewing 1-to-5 stars into the sky doesn't come naturally. :P
I need to hear Martin Scorsese’s take on how the Gnome-Cinematic Universe is ruining cinema as an art form.
Also, I know animated films are what you tend to focus on in these blog posts, but I would be ever so inclined to read your reviews on Mid-90’s/Early 2000’s comedies starring former SNL cast members (but, like, very specifically; Master of Disguise)
Netflix animated films are always a curious case as to what's theirs or not, as the majority of animated films they release are acquisitions they pick up that couldn't get a distributor or sufficient backing for production. If the latter, like with del Toro's Pinocchio that no main studio would pick up for years to finance, then it's fair to call it a film of theirs. Klaus was similar, no one else would finance it despite Sergio Pablos working on it for years. Ditto for Nimona: even if it was 75% complete, they did rescue it from Disney's conservative grave.
On the other end of the scale, something like Mitchells was basically complete when COVID sticking around forced Sony (the only Big Five studio to not have its own streaming platform) to shop the film around. So they had no creative say in the thing, being it was already completed, though as they paid something like $90 million, it's fair for them to own it in perpetuity. Gnome Alone was finished and started releasing around the world here and there in late 2017, so it was very much a case of Netflix grabbing a film no one else wanted for a cheap price.
Back to the Outback is the only one I can't find a definitive answer on how far along it was when Netflix acquired it (just because they announce it late doesn't mean they only acquired it then), with the only clue being that some of the key creative personal has been on Dreamworks' cancelled film Larrakins, also featuring animals in the Australian outback, and pivoted in a different direction with the concept.
Takeaway from all this is, what qualifies as a Netflix film is very vague, and mostly down to their own whims, though far more often than not, they acquire films in production or already finished over outright commissioning new things (advantage of grabbing finished things no one else has is you get a bargain for it). Certainly miles different than their animated tv shows, where they commission and produce fully on their own many.
Also, A New Generation isn't fully a Netflix film the way these are: on top of them getting it too late into production for it to be affected (at most, it would have been a year before release, when the execs decided they couldn't risk not being able to release in cinemas the following Autumn), the film has been available recently for paid purchase on other platforms. I believe it may have just been a time-limited distribution deal, something Hasbro could afford as the toy sales are the big benefit and it's in their benefit in the future years to fully own it for back catalogue re-releases. I don't know how much of that applies to the followup tv series, though given Tell Your Tale is primarily on YouTube, most probably as well, to a small degree.
Anyway, my take on these flicks! Only seen two of these, Pinocchio and Mitchells. I will see Klaus at some point, while Nimona is pretty high on my list of priorities. The other two remain hard passes, I've passed the point of giving medicore flicks the time of day without an extra reason or obligation.
Pinocchio imprisoned in Stromboli's cage, Pleasure Island turning the boys into donkeys to be sold off as slaves, Gepetto's adult fear at losing his son, innumerable twisted figures taking advantage of the wooden puppet and the Monstro sequence would like a word with you.
Really, outside of chunks of Fantasia and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, I don't think another Disney Animation has so much material locked to scare the daylights out of kids (in the good way, the way that keeps them glued to the screen).
As for del Toro's take here and now, I can understand finding it a little alienating, yeah. Certainly, I think it's a little overrated (Puss in Boots: The Last Wish was easily the better of the two Best Animated Feature forerunners last year, though I have such respect for del Toro repeating his "animation isn't a genre, it's an art form" speech at every award ceremony). Some of the elements, namely the fasicm, are laid on a bit thicker and longer than is needed (the Mussolini cameo is… a thing).
That said, while I wouldn't necessarily reach to rewatch it all that much, I don't think the elements are in opposition to one another and coalesce well enough under a solid, unique vision. Certainly, it's the second-best Pinocchio film after the Disney classic.
As for Mitchells, my take is not that different from yours (stock plot, the technological villains are by far the best thing, the sense of humour is nails on a chalkboard), I just find all the points less strong, averaging out to a passing grade. Except the visuals, those are amazing, but they speak for themselves.
I have little reason to ever revisit the film now, as the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (my first proper exposure to the franchise) is quite similar but better in virtually every non-visual aspect (and the visuals mostly come down to the intentionally ugly aspects of the slacker-graffiti art style not being able to dazzle for a whole feature). The modern humour is a lot more restrained and organic to the situations and characters (also, we have reached a point where a film referencing properties the parent company doesn't own is a rarity, so I have to praise this one for that), and while the character plot is a stock "nervous teen kids wanting to fit in" thing that does homogenise their personalities a bit, it's earnest and sufficient enough.
Also, the film doesn't slow down and get dull the way Mitchells' endless third act does, a perfect demonstration of why third acts are better off on the short side in animation.
5750063
"Troggs" sounds to me more like someone was trolling Joe Bloggs. It's such a non-threatening name to give to your antagonist species. Even Tribbles had irony points.
Quartet, if you include Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.
5750070
I did legitimately wonder going in if the Gnomeo and Juliet thing was by any way connected to Gnome Alone, but it's just coincidence.
I've only seen that film reviewed, and it was still an awful experience.
5750087
I went into this totally ignorant of what qualified as a Netflix exclusive (later, the TV Tropes page list guided my hand a little). Always good to get clarifications on the criteria for inclusion, though.
Take it as a given I meant this relatively. Even old-school Nightmare Fuel Disney wouldn't have had the guts to put a fascist movement front and centre in their version.
Damn straight.
Wait, what racism? I feel like I missed something major here.
It's the sort of film you'd eagerly show art students to impress upon them the strengths of a directorial vision. Especially in conjunction with Pan's Labyrinth.
Unlike my take on The LEGO Movie - where I can pinpoint precisely when the film starts stumbling for me - I struggle to pin down what the main problem is that I have with The Mitchells vs. the Machines. No one flaw seems all that terrible in isolation (some of the meme humour got an immature giggle out of me, for example), and some elements are straight-up fantastic (anything to do with the Max robots). I remember enjoying it a lot in the moment. It's more in hindsight that I overall don't feel as fired up about it.
Much as I've seen this criticism in other quarters too, I must have different tastes in pacing, because the third act never bothered me. Well, no more than the other two acts did.
Remind me to gush my heart out over this film in the not-too-distant future. 😻
5750096
It's a sign of how rarely the term is typed out relative to its r-cousin that fascism got auto-corrected and I didn't notice.
I should say I've seen very little of del Toro's directorial work, though I have seen a lot of things he pitched in on, produced or consulted with.
Probably just boils down to whether one has been won over to the characters; if one hasn't been, the moment in a film where they move from End-of-Act-II despair to the action finale is a signifier of "nearly there…!", so when it thus is a lengthy one, percentage-wise, you really notice. That's my theory, anyway.
5750037
I feel the same way!
Impossible Numbers, thank you for these reviews. They seem pretty well thought out and informative! I also get to calibrate by comparing your commentary and reactions to the ways I did or didn't like whichever movies among these that I already saw.
5750147
Oh, calibration is tight!
(Sorry, I've been watching some Screen Rant Pitch Meeting vids lately. You'd think it'd be hard to get through so many vids, but actually it's super-easy. Barely an inconvenience).
I was going to ask Mockingbirb if they liked dark things, but then I saw the avatar.
It most certainly is. Look at how nearly all of those movies are full-CGI animated. That alone says enough.
5750182
Keep in mind I avoided many of the cheap-looking ones.
That did give me more hits than misses, and I don't hold the use of CGI against movies (I remember the golden age of Pixar and the best of Dreamworks), but yeah, there's a certain kind of CGI movie that's like... no, not a fan.
God, I'm trying to remember what the last Netflix original thing before Pinocchio I bothered to sign in for even was. I wanna say either G5 or the Rise of the TMNT movie (loved it, still think it's a crime the series didn't get the room it deserved, but what a great note to go out on) but both aren't really "Netflix originals". Klaus, maybe? I always meant to log in and catch The House at some point, and I know I've seen it somewhere, I just also know it must've been on a TOTALLY LEGIT HAHA WHY WOULD YOU THINK OTHERWISE site.
Come to that I don't even remember what the last TV show I used it for because I was too lazy to dig out the boxset. Desmond's maybe?
Point being, strange how far a star can fall, eh?
A real sleeper you might have missed (almost everybody I've talked to had a, "Never heard of it," reaction) is The Magician's Elephant.
Oh, and there's an "Art of" web page up for Nimona: https://artofnimona.com/
Excellent reviews. I might have to watch a couple of these.
5750362
Netflix has been the main TV focus for me for a while, but it comes and goes in and out of long-term fashion. A few months back, I was more interested in Disney+.
What I don't understand is why they keep removing stuff. I've lost a couple of movies to that strange policy, and I swear the MLP:FiM episode count went from the first five seasons to just Season One. I mean, it's not like they need to make physical room in physical space for more shows, is it?
5750437
That is champion, that is.
Although damn does Nimona have brutal ideas on legless fashion.
5750583