Tag: Animation

Zootropolis/Zootopia 2 (2025) Review

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Quick synopsis: Detectives Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde find themselves on the twisting trail of a mysterious reptile who turns the mammal metropolis of Zootopia upside down.

I may have made a mistake going in. I tend to avoid reviews before seeing a film, but sometimes I do accidentally glance at one, or at least see the headline. The one headline I saw for this described it as a “soulless film-by-numbers affair filled with corporately approved jokes” and “might as well be AI-generated”. So I went in with low expectations. After viewing Zootropolis 2, I don’t understand where that reviewer was coming from. It’s not quite as good as the first one, but it is still a worthy viewing experience.

Most of the cast from the first film return, including Tiny Lister, through the use of archival recordings. Joining the cast are Patrick Warburton, Macaulay Culkin, Ke Huy Quin, and Andy Samberg. That’s the main cast; the voice cameos make it look like whoever wrote the Wikipedia page is just making shit up; Ed Sheeran, Mario Lopez, Mae Martin, Auli’i Cravalho, Tig Notaro, The Rock, CM Punk, Roman Reigns. The last two are particularly fun as the Zebros, who seem like the kind of characters destined for a spinoff.

So how does the story compare? It’s good, but it does feel reminiscent of the first one. The whole “the ones you think are dangerous aren’t really” message is essentially the same as the first one. There’s even the “cuddly animal you thought was friendly turns out to be a dick” plot twist. That one in particular hurt, as it seemed so obvious that I felt it must be a red herring. The Nick and Judy relationship also repeats some moments from the first movie. If the first movie didn’t exist, this would be great; as it is, it feels kind of like a remake.

I think it would have been stronger if they hadn’t done that late-stage heel turn; it would have backed up the film’s thesis that “it’s your personality that determines you, not your species/family”. It also misuses Dawn Bellwether from the first movie; she gets broken out of prison, then arrested again at the end. I’m not asking for her to have a huge impact on the story, but why bother bringing her back if you’re not going to use her at all? I also wasn’t impressed with how they say that Nick has a phobia of reptiles, then never mention it again.

That is a rather negative way of looking at it. On its own merits, it’s charming. It’s also very funny; packed full of jokes; there are moments where it feels like they’re cramming them in until it’s fit to bursting. Gary The Snake is a wonderful character who suits the franchise. It has enough heart to carry it through its weaker moments, and the animation is absolutely gorgeous. This isn’t as focused on the characters in the world as the first one, but the world itself is explored more; we get a much bigger focus on how the world works, how the different zones interact, etc.

In summary, just as good as the first one, and the signs for the inevitable third one are good.





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Lilo And Stitch (2025) Review

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Quick Synopsis: Stitch is an alien who pretends to be a dog when he gets adopted by Lilo.

I need to preface this review with one important detail: I’m not a massive fan of the original. I don’t dislike it. I find it charming, funny, and it is actually a brilliant film. However, I have no personal attachment or deep love for it, so I’m not personally offended by changes made. With that in mind, I’m going to be reviewing this mostly as a stand-alone and will be judging it on its own merits. I’ll try not to make too many comparisons to the original, ranting about how “but they changed this so it sucks”.

That being said, I do have to acknowledge that this is a live-action remake of an animated film. Which is why I wasn’t a fan of the opening. For a film like this, you want to show off how different it looks outside of animation. You want to heavily showcase either the design of Stitch or the beautiful locations. Instead, LAS starts on a spaceship full of CGI characters. Yes, it’s photorealistic CGI, but it would have been nice to see them show us something real first.

The downside of a live-action film based on a child is that a lot of children aren’t good actors, so it’s risky getting them to lead your movie. It’s somewhat easier in animation because you can go race-blind (and age-blind too) if you need to, a trick you can’t get away with in live-action; no matter how long she’s done the voice for, nobody would buy Nancy Cartwright as a live-action Bart Simpson. Maia Kealoha is charming as Lilo. Her interactions with Stitch are heartfelt and wonderful, really selling the idea that they’re close. The rest of the cast is pretty good. I always love seeing Billy Magnussen in anything; he brings a Tudyk energy to everything he does. It’s also nice to see Hannah Waddington firmly stepping into her role as the Queen of British Accents. She’s long been appreciated for her theatre work, but since Ted Lasso, she now seems to be Hollywood’s new “middle-aged posh British lady”, and I’m all here for it. Also, every time I see her, I fall a little bit more in love with Amy Hill; she has the energy of a grandparent who slips you whiskey behind your parents’ back.

I have no issues with the look. It would have been nice to showcase more of the island, but I suppose that would go against the “OMG, fucking tourists!” message. Although the “tourists are ruining this island and forcing us into demeaning customs” message is already diluted somewhat by a car company offering a holiday to Hawaii in association with this movie. Disney are the fucking worst.

Stitch looks fantastic. He feels more dog-like in this, not enough that you still don’t find it weird that nobody notices he’s not a dog. But enough that you can conceivably buy it. The live-action nature of this means his chaos seems more real. When he ruins a wedding party, it’s not “wacky animated hijinks”, it’s “if I find this thing, I’m going to kill it because it ruined my day”.

Now onto the ending. I’ll talk about it more at the end of the year, so I can do so without spoilers, but lets just say it’s received A LOT of hatred online. “Ohana means nobody gets left behind, unless I have somewhere better to stay, in which case, fuck you Lilo”. I don’t hate it as much as everyone else seems to. I mean, it’s not good, and it definitely goes against the spirit of the movie. But I see what they were going for. I recognise they were going for something different but equally heartwarming; they just didn’t pull it off. There is a way to pull that ending off, I’m not sure what it is, but it does exist.

Moana 2 (2024) Review

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Quick Synopsis: Moana journeys to the far seas of after receiving an unexpected call from her wayfinding ancestors.

Moana 2: More-ana has received a lot of criticism upon release. From people saying “It was obviously supposed to be a TV show” (which it was), to just a general sense of disappointment. At the time of writing, it has a 61% score on Rotten Tomatoes, that’s only 2% away from being rotten. It’s not as good as the first one, but it’s certainly not a bad movie. It currently has an audience score (sorry, “Popcornmeter”, FFS) of 81%. That feels more accurate based on the 95% score of the original.

Yes, it has its flaws. The music isn’t anywhere near as good and feels more unnatural than it did in the original. The villain isn’t quite as present, to the point where the film seems to be building up someone else as the villain, who then turns out to be helpful and isn’t mentioned again. It also has more moments that feel cringy compared to the original.

It is still fun though. It adds to the story from the first one in a logical way, expanding the universe that was created. Most of the original cast return, and the new voices slot right in; Rose Matafeo BELONGS in more Disney movies, and her voice is perfect for animation. David Fane also feels so natural that I had to check he wasn’t in the original. The Rock continues to do what he does, and Auli’i Cravalho is still one of the most perfect castings any animation has ever done, she sounds like how her character looks (although I still maintain that Moana herself looks like an animated version of Jennifer Freeman, the second Claire from My Wife And Kids).

The movie looks GORGEOUS. Water is generally really hard to animate due to the unpredictable nature of how it moves (second only to George Best in the 1966 European Cup quarter-final against Benfica), so it’s very easy to mess up. There are no moments here where the animation takes you out. It looks so perfect and real that it almost feels live-action. This is why it’s so baffling that a live-action version of Moana is being made. Why? It hasn’t been long enough since the original to justify it, and there is no way it will look as good, so what’s the point? The high quality of Moana 2: The Ocean Strikes Back means that audiences are fully invested in this iteration of the character, all a live-action version will do is dilute or taint the love for the franchise.

In summary; this film is good, only tainted by how utterly superb the first one was. The reviews are wrong, except for this one, I am always right.

The Wild Robot (2024) Review

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Quick Synopsis: Roz (short for ROZZUM unit 7134, nothing to do with Peri Gilpin’s character from Frasier) is a helper robot with nobody to help after the cargo ship delivering her crashed into an island. After being rejected by the local wildlife she finds herself as the de facto mother of Brightbill, the lone surviving gosling (of the non-Ryan variety) of a Roz-related accident which killed off his entire family.

I very rarely go to see kids’ films at the cinema, especially not ones without what I would deem an appropriate “in”. I think it’s perfectly acceptable for an adult to go see a Pixar film, for example, but there are some for which it would be a bit weird to see a lone adult male in the screening. As such, I don’t often see trailers for those films. This meant I didn’t really know what The Wild Robot (TWR: pronounced Too-war) was about. I knew the title, and I knew it was supposed to be above average. But the story? Not a clue. The actors? No idea. The animation style? Nope. I didn’t even know if it was American, Japanese, English, French, or even from the Anconine Republic (although if you googled that country you’d be sceptical about whether an animated film would be released in 2024 that was made in that country).

The opening is “shot” from a weird fish-eye POV, so I was slightly worried that the whole thing would be like that, thankfully it’s not. I still didn’t entirely vibe with the animation style though. It’s incredible sometimes, with things moving with a beautiful fluidity and realness. But then there are times when the animals (the fox voiced by Pedro Pascal is the clearest example) almost seem TOO fluid like they’re made from watercolour paintings. On their own, that’s fine, but alongside the backgrounds, it’s jarring from a visual perspective. Mostly, the visuals are superb though. The world looks real, trees have imperfections, grass sways in the wind, and the sky is awe-inspiring in terms of colours (especially in the closing third).

I have a few nitpicks with the story itself. Some story beats move unnaturally quickly, and characters trust each other too quickly, to the point it seems like it’s setting some of them up for third-act heel turns. It doesn’t feel like a singular narrative at times, there’s no sense of the world flowing towards the natural conclusion. Instead, it feels like the story is being told by a kid who has joined an improv group “This happens. Then this happens, and then this happens”.

That’s a very mild criticism though, TWR is an incredibly easy film to fall in love with. Kids will (hopefully) love it, and there’s enough in there to keep parents entertained without resorting to the cliche Shrek-style “penis jokes that will go over the heads of children”. There’s no sense of cynicism or misery to TWR, it’s an experience which fills you with hope. The performances are all pitch-perfect, but it’s still weird to hear Matt Berry in a kids’ film as you keep expecting him to call someone an arsehole. Catherine O’Hara continues to be a delight. Stephanie Hsu is good, but criminally underutilized. Lupita Nyong’o is the true heart, and her performance beats beautifully. Kit Connor is pretty great too, but really it’s a showcase for Nyongo’s vocal work. She provides a good mix of humanity and confused AI.

At the start of the year, I looked at what was due out and had mentally already placed Paddington In Peru as the winner for “best kids film”, partly based on knowing that Inside Out 2 was going to hit adults MUCH harder than it would kids. For most of the year, the marmalade magnificence still had no competition, but now with both Transformers One and The Wild Robot? Paddington is going to have its work cut out, especially with the recasting issues. TWR isn’t just good, it’s magical.

Transformers One (2024) Review

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Quick Synopsis: A look at the inciting incident in the hatred between Optimus Prime and Megatron

I was mildly looking forward to this. The trailer caught my attention, and I thought, “That looks like a lot of silly fun.” A bit like the second coming of The Lego Batman Movie, which I still think is dumb brilliance. It’s not dumb brilliance, it’s just brilliant. Yes, it has some silly jokes, but nowhere near as much as it could. Before it fully settled into the tone I spotted numerous opportunities for some silly jokes, and I assumed it was the scriptwriters missing opportunities. That’s my bad, this is not attempting to be silly, just entertaining, and yes, Virginia, there is a difference. Everything makes sense within the logic created. Also, EVERYTHING is played straight, to a horrific extent at some points.

This isn’t a “fun and joy for kids” movie. It deals with colonialism, disability rights, hierarchal power structures, appeals to authority fallacies etc. It doesn’t shy away from darkness, characters are decapitated, torn apart, mutilated at birth, and stabbed repeatedly. You don’t expect kids’ films to feature a scene of a main character being horrifically tortured, and you certainly don’t expect it to be shown and not just implied or cut away from.

This is only the second film that Josh Cooley has directed, and he does brilliantly. It will be a weird thing to say as a response to an animated kid’s film, but I feel he would make a fantastic horror film. He knows about scale, he knows about tension, and he knows how to maximise character pain so that the audience can feel it, I shouldn’t wince in pain when an animated robot gets hurt, but this manages it. He’s helped by the animation style; it is almost stop-motion in how physically real the world looks.

It’s very well cast. There are NAMES in this, Johannson, Hemsworth, Fishbourne, Hamm etc. And all of them nail it, they actually act, and they’re not just doing their normal voices. The real MVP is Brian Tyree Henry. There’s one moment in particular where his performance is one of the best I’ve heard all year, not just in kids films, in general. His conviction and passion is breathtaking, and it’s genuinely chilling to hear him deliver it, particularly the line “No, I want to kill him” which would easily be seen as cheesy if delivered by a lesser performer.

I know I’ve seen the first Michael Bay Transformers movie, and I think I’ve seen the second one too. But I can’t remember much from them, they were fine as I was watching them, but nothing stands out, it was just metal smashing metal like some Robot Fuck Club (great band name). This? I will remember this. At the risk of sounding crude, it’s f*cking fantastic. It has everything I want in a movie; laughs, good characters, references to Key And Peele sketches, looks fantastic, heart, and some mild terror. Some people may argue that the start of darkness is too obvious. Those people are wrong, it’s not “predictable”, it’s foreshadowing/storytelling, and damn fine storytelling at that.

Inside Out 2 (2024) Review

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Quick synopsis: Riley is now a teenager, and with increased age comes increase emotion.

With Pixar, you know what you’re getting; emotions. They’ve given emotions to a wide variety of things: toys, dinosaurs, Scottish people. Inside Out is the most obvious example of this: What if emotions had emotions? It wasn’t crying out for a sequel, it was pretty self-contained and didn’t leave any unanswered questions. That doesn’t mean a sequel doesn’t make sense. It was a film about childhood emotions, and (spoilers), emotions don’t stop when people hit their teens.

Let’s be honest, even if it didn’t NEED a sequel, it’s very easy to picture how to do one. As people grow, their emotions develop and become more complex. It’s the complexity of developing emotions that drives the plot of Inside Out 2 (IO2, pronounced Eye-owe-two, like the surname of a lower league Ghanaian footballer). As well as the returning Sadness, Joy, Disgust (sadly no longer voiced by Mindy Kaling over a pay dispute), Anger and Fear, there are also new emotions in the form of Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui. Three of them slot effortlessly and are believable (albeit incredibly late arriving, are you saying other people didn’t have anxiety until they were teens? Lucky bastards), Ennui feels the most out of place and unnecessary.

The main difference in this entry is the importance placed on Sense Of Self. At first, it just seems like a clever way of displaying something, but the pay-off when Riley is affected by self-doubt, and how it affects her sense of self, is f*cking marvellous and one of the best things I’ve seen this year. It’s a perfect encapsulation of how you can crippled by anxiety and worries, and how they can lead to you keep making things worse in an attempt to make them better.

IO2 actually does a pretty good job of explaining the benefits of anxiety; preparing you for things which have not yet come to be (a bit like that super scary thing in The Muppet Christmas Carol). On the downside, that does mean that Joys arc of “oh, I see that negative emotions value now, I should help them and ease them into this system” is very similar to her arc in the first movie. I know there will be some narrative crossover, but there are times where it does feel like we’re just watching the same thing again.

That’s a very small issue though, overall it’s delightful, in a kind of depressing way. This, like all Pixar films, will break you slightly. But it will also rebuild you. That’s what Pixar do, they make you sad, but then they leave you feeling inspired and hopefull. They’re masters at it, and nobody does it better, except for Carly Simon.

Fun fact btw: When I left the cinema after seeing this I overheard a small child say it wasn’t very realistic because “why would someone’s brain make them feel worse?”. That poor sweet innocent child.

Elemental (2023)

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Quick synopsis: A fire girl and water guy meet and fall in love.

Pixar are one of the few studios I actively trust. If a film has already piqued my interest, then finding out it’s being released by Blumhouse or A24 might make me go see it slightly quicker, but their name being attached to something is not going to be the deciding factor in me watching it. But Pixar is different, if a Pixar film is released, I’m going to see it, because 90% of the time it’s going to be a really good experience (okay I’ve just run the numbers and it’s actually 84% of the time, but that’s still a really good hit rate). With the exception of Cars 2, even low-grade Pixar is still better than 90% of stuff out there. So where does this rank? It’s not up there with the best, but it’s nowhere near the worst. In terms of the bad; the plot is predictable. Sometimes when I say that I mean it in a “when you get near the final third you can figure out what’s happening next”, sometimes I mean it in a “by the end of the first act I can guess the ending”, for this? I could figure out what was going to happen just by looking at the poster. It’s incredibly predictable, you can figure out what will happen, how it will happen, and when it will. But that doesn’t actually matter, sometimes predictability is okay. It would be weird if someone remade Romeo and Juliet but changed the ending so that both characters ended up being 3 otters in a trenchcoat who were intent on stealing the world’s supply of fish. Yes, it would be a surprise, but it would also be shit and not make any sense. Sometimes you want a simple story about a guy meeting a girl and they end up together.

That only works if the audience buys into the central concept, and to do that, they need to WANT the two people to be together. I can’t speak for everybody, but I REALLY wanted the two to be together, the way they react to each other is adorable. They’re played by performers I’m not too familiar with; Leah Lewis was in How To Deter A Robber, and Mamoudou Athie was in Patti Cake$, but I can’t remember them too much, all I can remember from Athie’s performance in PC was how much he reminded me of the guy from Lightspeed Champion. It’s a really fresh cast in terms of how unknown everybody is, the only name most people will recognise is Catherine O’Hara. It’s a brave move to anchor so much on unknown performers, but it works. From a vocal performance, they’re absolutely perfect, the voices match the body types; Lewis has a firey voice which speaks in short bursts, whereas Athie has a vocal performance that feels more fluid and like it’s a continuous flow.

The animation is stunning. Two things are notably difficult to animate; fire and water. So deciding to have a film based on characters comprised of those two things is a display of either bravery or stupidity. It could have looked awful. Thankfully it looks astounding, everything works together to create a visual treat. All the characters have a weight to them which means they don’t just feel like 2-dimensional images on screen, but feel incredibly real and wonderful. The way the buildings are designed around the different elements is delightful.

Now onto the best thing; the emotion. Pixar are bastards because they know how to emotionally manipulate you. They know how to make you cry like a child who has lost their ice cream. It’s not sophisticated; it’s pretty basic in terms of how they signpost it and pull it off, but it’s so damn effective that even when you know you’re being manipulated you can’t resist it.

As I said though, it is predictable, and there are a few plot points which don’t get to be as important as you feel they could be. When it has a choice between the big and the personal, it goes with the personal. But still sets up the big thing. It’s a bit weird and feels slightly first draft. If they paid more love to the script it could have been great, instead, it’s just pretty damn good.

Tom And Jerry (2021)

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Remember when The Muppets film came out a while ago? How it was full of celebrity cameos and created a real sense of both wonder and nostalgia? This is like the opposite of that. It has some celebrities who clearly love the franchise, and are clearly having a lot of fun. But the script and the film are just not good enough. Tom And Jerry have never had much luck when it comes to escaping their original shorts. The 1992 movie was heavily derided for having a weak plot, and having the main characters talk (which is a mistake this film does not make), and the less said about their version of Willy Wonka (why?) the better.

Maybe it’s because the madcap pace of the characters is difficult to maintain and keep interesting over the course of a feature length film. Or, maybe even simpler (but sadder), is that the studios know that they don’t have to put any effort into these films, because they know they’ll make money anyway, so they can be lazy and cheap with it.

On the plus side, the animation is pretty good. They’ve kept the fluid 2D nature of the originals, and overlaid them on a live action setting, which is really the best way to do it. If it was completely animated it wouldn’t have felt different enough, and if they tried for a realistic look for the characters, it….well it would have been a fucking nightmare to put it politely. The 2D violence still has an effect on the world though, scratches appear on sofas when they fight etc, in a way that can’t have been fun to line up the timings of the animation for. There are moments where the mix isn’t quite as seamless as it needs to be, but overall that aspect of it works. Another good part of the animation: ALL animals are animated, even ones in the background. A neat touch that wasn’t necessary, but very much appreciated.

Now onto the negative, the script. It’s……well it’s incredibly lazy. I can’t imagine the writer spending weeks fretting over scenes in this, so much of it seems so careless and unnecessary, you could cut most of the opening and it wouldn’t effect the film at all. I’ll describe the opening moments:

  1. Tom is playing music in a park for money.
  2. Jerry comes along and starts dancing, putting a sign over Tom’s sign so that he gets the money instead.
  3. They fight, breaking Tom’s keyboard meaning he can’t play anymore. (this does lead a moment where someone is outraged that Tom isn’t blind: “he’s not a blind cat playing the keyboard, he’s a regular cat, this is an outrage” which genuinely made me laugh)
  4. At some point, Tom bumps into Chloë Grace Moretz’s character, knocking stuff out of her hand and causing her to lose her job.
  5. Moretz’s character gets a job at a hotel where Jerry sneaks in and causes rumours of an infestation.
  6. Tom gets hired to deal with Jerry.

EVERYTHING before point five is not needed. We don’t need to really know that Tom is a musician, and if we do, then it could be shown during the rest of the film, not just at the start. We don’t need to see Moretz get fired, we just need to see her get a job. We don’t need to see Tom And Jerry fight, they don’t need THAT motivation for anger towards each other. The fact that Tom is hired to get rid of Jerry should be enough motivation to carry the rest of their antics. The fact that the makers of this film couldn’t see that, is emblematic of the problems this film has. It’s an easy fix, but one that they couldn’t be bothered to do for whatever reason. It also doesn’t help that sometimes Tom And Jerry feel like side characters in their own movie. I know, it’s difficult to build a feature length narrative about two characters that don’t speak, and you can’t exactly make these character speak. But if you can’t make a good movie, don’t make a movie. This feels like it was made for the sake of being made. Everything about it just screams “contractual/celebratory obligation”. There’s no desire, no passion, there’s no sense that this is what anybody who worked on it has had their entire career building to this moment. Which considering how beloved these characters are, is a real shame. The franchise inspires a lot of love in people, it’s just a shame not a damn ounce of it was in the script.

On the plus side: there’s a surprising performer I didn’t know I’d love as much as I did. Yes, Rob Delaney is as great as he usually is, but the real star of the show for me is Patsy Ferran as an awkward bellhop. Her character steals every single scene she’s in and I wish it focused more on her instead of, well, every other human character.

It’s really hard to recommend this movie, the fact that there’s a slight chance that this review is the first time you were aware of the film is quite indicative of the quality of it.

Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

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Do you have an interest in seeing this film? Then see it at the cinema. Trust me, this is a cinema film. You’ll get a lot more out of seeing this on a big screen than you will by sitting on your sofa watching it. This is spectacle cinema at it’s very best. And like most spectacle cinema, you do feel it’s lacking something though.

It’s not the performances, they’re all fantastic. All of them, and there’s a lot of them. I think it has so many characters as this film was made with an eye towards a sequel. I mean, with the ending this film has, it has to have a sequel otherwise the story will just be unfinished. Christoph Waltz actually seems charming and not-evil in this film, which I didn’t know he was capable of (off topic, if they do a remake of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he’s Judge Doom). The star of the show is definitely Rosa Salazar, who is so damn impressive in this it’s hard to believe. The way they kind of animate her eyes is genius, a beautiful blend of reality and CGI which is an incredible use of the technology. It’s not being used to replace or create reality, but to work alongside it, which is a technique which always works better.

Now the downside; the big one is the plot is kind of generic. The romance sub-plot seems kind of forced. A lot of the dialogue is just explaining plot points and character motivations to the audience, some of which could have been done a lot more subtly. It’s tonally all over the place, going from a film that’s seemingly aimed at children, to a dog being slaughtered then having its blood used as war paint before saying “fuck mercy” and killing someone. It’s a 12A which features a character being chopped in half at the waist, not a robot, a human. I’m not sure if being chopped in half would kill a robot in this film as it’s incredibly inconsistent when it comes to things like that. Sometimes having a limb chopped off leads to them being severely weakened and makes them as good as dead, and sometimes they just walk it off like it doesn’t affect them. It makes the action scenes difficult to get invested in as after every hit you’re not sure how to react, did that cause immense damage, or does it not matter? You have no idea until AFTER each hit, there are no rules set to tell you which makes it incredibly frustrating.

I feel I need to mention the motorball sequences. They’re the action highlights of the film and make you want to see a film based around it (wait, that exists, it’s called Rollerball and the original is awesome), in fact, I would be genuinely surprised if there’s not a video game based on that sequence, and kind of disappointed.

So should you see it? I’d say yes. The visual world-building is top notch and film-making like this deserves to be rewarded. So go buy a ticket and see it at the cinema, even if you’re not blown away, I highly doubt you’ll regret it either.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (2019)

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I genuinely enjoyed this film and will definitely buy it on DVD when it comes out. It was funny, heartwarming and had an incredibly well-crafted script that is suitable for children and adults. If you asked me during the first half of the movie my response would have been the opposite. I was kind of bored, the jokes were mainly from the trailer so were ones I’d heard before, and the songs were only okay. That songs gripe might not have been the film though, it is possible that the way the cinema set it up was the problem; the background noise and the music was louder than the lyrics so you couldn’t make them out clearly.

So yeah I was not a fan of the opening, it felt not quite as sharp as the first movie, and it sidelines a lot of the characters. Princess Unikitty for example was one of the highlights of the first movie and is not really in this one. The same goes for almost all of the characters from the first one with the exception of Emmet, Lucy, and Batman. This would be fine if the characters who replaced them were as good, and whilst there is nothing really wrong with them they just miss that spark.

One other issue is reality. In the first movie the fact that it was a kid playing with lego didn’t really matter until the very end of the movie. In this it goes throughout, which is both better and worse. It does mean that since you’re constantly aware that it’s kids playing with toys, your brain always thinks “ok, this is what’s happening in the film, now what’s REALLY happening?” so you can’t really get invested in it. The upside is how beautifully it ties into the ending. The final third of this film is amazing and WOULD NOT work without the reality subtext. It’s genuinely genius what it does, and what it means. Yeah this film is about kids playing with toys, but it’s about HOW they play with them. It’s the first film I’ve seen which kind of takes aim at the notion of everything having to be dark and gritty, that phase which every teenage male goes through where they feel everything they like has to be grown up. The idea that films they watch have to be dark and fully of guns. A concept which causes people to try so hard to appear to be mature that it comes off as juvenile. This film takes aim at that notion, and does so wonderfully. The way that reality bleeds into this film is a work of art and I commend it.

So yeah, go see this film, see it twice if you have to. It may not start great but it does achieve greatness when you stick with it. Has a few niggles, and there’s one live action moment which drags longer than it needs to. But it’s very funny with GREAT voice performances and is just as loveable as the first one