Elliot The Littlest Reindeer (2018) - Movie Review

 

2018, more so than a lot of years previously, has shown that the trend of family films about talking animals has been a scourge on the landscape of modern cinema. It’s the one sub-genre that I can tie to some of this year’s worst product, and whichever ones that are actually worth bothering with are few and far between. And sure enough, we got another weaksauce one today.

This animation is butt ugly. The humans look like they escaped the first draft of a Dreamworks Netflix show, complete with some of the worst-looking ears I can recall in an animated feature, and the animals all have that conspicuously plastic sheen that comes with lower-tier animation houses. The scenery is incredibly bland, only made worse by how embarrassingly low-res the snow is. I don’t know how in the hell you screw up snow this badly, but well done, I guess?

The story is complete bunk too. It really says something when your final act includes psycho goats, a mad scientist-grade weather machine and animals being sold off to be turned into cheap jerky, and yet none of it feels like it means anything. It leans so hard into sports film tropes, from the uber-arrogant rival (whom the film can’t make its mind about regarding whether it’s just him that’s a douchebag or if it’s his entire species) to the best friend/coach to the underdog wanting to make his mark in a field not made for him, that it makes the seemingly important stuff feel inconsequential. Again, when the stakes are so high that you and all of your friends could end up as food if things don’t work out, there should be some level of urgency to this.

But nope, it’s holiday fluff where the only real message behind it is “dream big”. Hard to take seriously when the production as a whole seems intent on dreaming as small as possible.