Tony Leondis
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Connections, in both directions
The animation, clever though it is, looks like outtakes from Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas.
The Bigger Picture: Igor's characters look like they've stumbled in from The Nightmare Before Christmas or Corpse Bride.
Directed by Anthony Leondis (Lilo & Stitch 2), Igor is filled with images that evoke animated predecessors like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Monsters, Inc. and Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines, but its clich?-laden characters and mediocre animation do little to further the artistic evolution of the medium, or even manage to tell a story that anyone other than the makers themselves will care about.
Yes, Tim Burton has covered this milieu before in animated ‘toons like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride , but there’s a certain hip-factor to this amusing flick set in the world of creepy science labs as an homage to the Frankenstein and Dracula films of the ‘30s.
IGOR borrows its animation style from Tim Burton and its story from Young Frankenstein , but even with such classic inspiration, it's only OK.
Igor is clearly influenced by Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas (it goes so far as mimicking the film's stop-animation look with computer animation), The Corpse Bride and Young Frankenstein.
MGM's "Igor," written by Chris McKenna (TV's "American Dad!") and directed by Anthony Leondis ("Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch"), owes many debts, from its "Nightmare Before Christmas" production design (King Malbert being a less inspired version of Halloweentown's Mayor) to an amalgamation of Bill the Cat, "Pinky and the Brain" and MST3K's gumball bot for the characters of Scamper (voice of Steve Buscemi, "Charlotte's Web") and Brain (voice of Sean Hayes, TV's "Will & Grace"), Igor's assistants.
Since “ Toy Story ” became an enormous box-office hit and a beloved modern masterpiece by giving audiences an inspired look at what ordinary toys do when their owners aren’t around, Hollywood has been striving to repeat that seemingly simple formula with a number of animated films that have offered viewers a privileged glimpse at the heretofore unseen existence of everything from the shelves of a grocery store (the execrable “Foodfight!”) to the psyche of a young girl (the stunning “ Inside Out ”).
It’s obvious within 20 minutes that “The Emoji Movie” is going to be a knockoff of “Inside Out,” with the world of Alex’s phone as the film’s intricate and looming geographical “brain” (the apps are like candy-colored skyscrapers), and each emoji presented as a primal emotion.
Leondis has cited Toy Story as an inspiration, but The Emoji Movie is more like a severely debased Inside Out that takes place inside of a smartphone.
If Pixar's Inside Out and Disney's Zootropolis showed how to immerse audiences in boldly envisioned worlds, Sony's animated kids' dud is an abject lesson in how not to do it.
Two years ago, when I reviewed Inside Out, I wrote the following about the animation style: “The ‘inside’ material has a fantastical, almost hand-drawn appearance - a shimmery, cartoonish look…” Would that something similar could be said about The Emoji Movie, but it opts instead for a cheaper, simpler look that isn’t going to awe or amaze anyone.
It vaguely recalls the parts of Inside Out in which the emotions (and Bing Bong) are traversing Riley’s subconscious mind, a landscape filled with set pieces that have to be visually interesting because there’s nothing concrete to draw on.
From the very notion of a society populated by beings with unchanging facial expression, The Emoji Movie extracts a totalitarian dystopia in which your civil service position is ordained by your God-given mood; their relationship to “the User” is not quite one of sanctified adoration, a la Toy Story , nor distant bewilderment, a la The Lego Movie , but of intimate, fearful distrust; a journey outside the bounds of Textopolis, where emoji live in perpetual servitude, reaps a long and treacherous journey among a half dozen nightmarish purgatories modeled on familiar apps.
Here's what you tell yourself when you accept an assignment to review a cartoon about emoji: "Remember what you thought when you heard about The Lego Movie ?
In the mold of “The Lego Movie,” which focused on a protagonist struggling against the limiting expectations of others, “The Emoji Movie” follows the character of Gene Meh (voiced by T.J. Miller, of “Big Hero 6”), an emoji who lives in the texting app of the smartphone owned by high school freshman Alex (voiced by Jake T. Austin, of “Rio 2”).
There’s a little bit of Inside Out in The Emoji Movie’s story, a little bit of The Lego Movie and much more of Sausage Party than you’d either expect or prefer.
There’s a similar pathetic humor to the constricted movement and expression of Lego figurines, which The Lego Movie exploited to far greater effect.
And if The Lego Movie can prove a reality-bending, mind-twisting delight, why not a story about humanity's new pictogram alphabet?