Jill Culton
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Connections, in both directions
I bring this up only because the studio’s two 2019 films, March’s How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World and the recent Abominable, both seem to be driven by the same basic artistic impulses and inclinations.
That it also makes obvious nods to the studio's first How To Train Your Dragon, as well as the classics King Kong and E.T., doesn’t take away from its inherent charm.
Writer-director Jill Culton’s Abominable is, by and large, a gene splice of How to Train Your Dragon and Ice Age, with its nefarious corporate-military villain drawing comparison to Incredibles 2 and its quirky background animal characters recalling the Madagascar series.
For every memorable franchise like Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, and How To Train Your Dragon, there’s a Boss Baby or The Croods that effectively weakens the brand.
It recycles a key element from DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon series: a nonhuman, nonverbal character who forms a touching bond with the human protagonist.
It’s tough to dislike any of these characters, but it’s tough to be particularly invested in them, either, and Abominable doesn’t have the visual grandeur of similar DreamWorks franchise How to Train Your Dragon to make up for the flat characters and dull narrative.
This includes the head of the corporation, a cranky old English villain named Burnish (Eddie Izzard), who initially comes across as a bland rip-off of Charles Muntz in Pixar’s Up, complete with the occasional trailer-ready “I want my yeti!” lines.
The plot is rote (much is lifted from “Up,” and Paulson’s character has a designed ripped from “Brave”), the characters are dull and even the adorable yeti at the heart of the film is just a slight tweak on Toothless, the central lizard from the “Train Your Dragon” franchise.
There’s the “going on a quest to an exotic locale” bit from “Up.” Heck, they even borrowed that film’s villain, an ancient explorer who wants to bag the mythical creature to silence the naysayers.
(The proximity of the release dates of these films brings to mind the 1998 clash between two similar toon flicks about insects, A Bug’s Life and Antz .)
Whether Armageddon/Deep Impact or AntZ/A Bug’s Life, examples abound, but even so, three very similar films is an anomaly.
Yi and company’s journey across China gives Culton opportunities to recreate the natural world in animation, not unlike Finding Nemo did.
This was followed by other selected instances of supposed parallel thinking ( Shark Tale and Finding Nemo ; Megamind and Despicable Me ), so it’s not shocking that with Abominable , DreamWorks has produced one of three different yeti-centric feature cartoons.
And “Shark Tale” (2004) and “Finding Nemo” (2003).
Directors Anthony Bell and Ben Gluck populate some decent looking scenery with Saturday morning cartoon wolves whose manes look more like Swiffer dusters than fur, then take the few concepts written by Chris Denk ("Shark Bait") and Steve Moore ("Open Season") and repeat them multiple times.
The most recent joint effort between actor Wuhl and "Open Season" executive producer Ron Shelton was the latter's "Cobb," an even more serious misfire due in part to Wuhl's poor thesping abilities.
One sequence involving Yi is a wonderful homage to First Blood.
Unlike Big Hero 6, which presented an American/Japanese hybrid city, Abominable is not afraid to delve into Asian culture.
Between our look at Yi and company’s life at home and our expansive view of their cross-China journey, the story is an even more welcome exploration of the Asian character aesthetics seen in, say, “Big Hero 6” (2014) and Pixar’s Oscar-winning short “Bao” (2018).
“Abominable” is a well intentioned, but ultimately, lackluster kid-friendly adventure that’s desperately trying to be the next “Big Hero 6” or “How To Train Your Dragon” (which is the best franchise in the Dreamworks canon).
Lawrence is the voice of Boog, a laid-back grizzly bear who follows in the footsteps of animated ursine creatures that go back at least as far as Hanna-Barbera's Yogi Bear and Baloo from Disney's "The Jungle Book," not to mention a certain former Baltimore Orioles first baseman.
We couldn’t help but regard the Mexican folk-art-styled “The Book of Life” (2014) differently after “Coco” (2017).
The directors of Open Season had hands in creating classics like The Lion King, Monsters, Inc., and Toy Story, and they do an admirable job of making their movie sparkle and shine with CGI glitter.
While Favreau's blue-collar beaver seems to represent the need in every animated film for a Brooklyn accent, he smartly underplays the sort of easy hamminess that reduced Rob Reiner's contributions to Everyone's Hero to sub-Monsters, Inc. shtick, and the rest of the cast also renders believable characters (so to speak) without simply trying to project their own voices or create something wackily memorable.
Hell, even the films ‘save the environment’ message was already done in Bee Movie.
The directors of Open Season had hands in creating classics like The Lion King, Monsters, Inc., and Toy Story, and they do an admirable job of making their movie sparkle and shine with CGI glitter.
In the opening scene, for example, the filmmakers acknowledge the medium's penchant for humanizing animals by allowing a human character to actually see two critters help each other; this eliminates that pesky "secret world of..." conceit that flourished since the first Toy Story and allows the film to play on a direct level to the audience without the need for a catalogue of cultural highlights.
For every memorable franchise like Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, and How To Train Your Dragon, there’s a Boss Baby or The Croods that effectively weakens the brand.
DreamWorks Animation has released a multitude of quality films over the past two decades, bringing to life a diverse array of projects that includes Chicken Run , The Prince of Egypt , and The Croods .
This is something for which Culton and DreamWorks should be commended when other films like Laika Studio’s Kubo and the Two Strings , a film set in Japan, utilized Caucasian actors for the leads.
Some of the plot elements of “Abominable” overlap a bit too much with Laika films “Kubo and the Two Strings” and “Missing Link,” which both considered Asian mythology and folkloric creatures.
That is significant and it’s more than Kubo and the Two Strings could claim with its voice cast, although Moana gets credit for its islander cast too.
Before you go thinking that Abominable is a grim-dark affair along the lines of live action-animation mash-up A Monster Calls , let’s get one thing straight.
Rupert Gregson-Williams’ score is up there with his work on Hacksaw Ridge and Wonder Woman; it’s a shame that in a key emotional scene the film plays Coldplay instead of a Williams’ piece.