SamSam (2020) - Movie Review

Some family films are better described as kids’ films, as they usually end up entertaining the kids but making their chaperones wish they were doing anything else. Some kids’ films are better described as family films, as they manage to give just as much entertainment value for the adults as it does for the kids (sometimes more so for the adults). This film somehow falls right down the middle of those two: It’s an animated film most definitely made for kids, one I can easily see being engaging for little’ins, but is rather inoffensive for adults. Not entertaining, just… inoffensive. And that’s not from lack of trying, just to make things more bizarre.

The animation itself is certainly some of the most aesthetically striking I’ve seen all year. It’s like a happy medium between Illumination Studios (French-influenced with jabbering Minionites called Wet-The-Bedders), Angry Birds (the villainous Martians are basically the Pigs with trumpet noses), and the round and bouncy fun-for-all-ages design that Aardman used for TV commercials back in the ‘90s. Granted, this isn’t stop-motion, but the level of detail put into the backdrops and the scene transitions, and even some of the creatures, is weirdly comparable. And when backed with Éric Neveux’s blend of French jazz and dance-pop, the presentation works nicely.

Then there’s the story, which also feels like a meeting point for a handful of varingly different styles. It’s part superhero story, part school social drama, part cosmic adventure, part thematic celebration of the power of laughter, all of which ends up rubbing up against each other in less-than-cohesive ways. The titular SamSam is a student at Cosmic Hero School, one who has yet to discover his cosmic powers like the rest of his classmates (although he’s still capable of driving a spaceship to school every morning, apparently), who forms an unlikely friendship with the daughter of a Martian dictator.

Yeah, it’s a fair bit of narrative overload, like someone played with the boards for Sky High (lower the eugenics subtext, but raise the visual variety) and threw half a dozen other ideas into the mix, and none of it stands out because of it. Partly because some of the messaging hits an odd note (it tries chalking up addiction to screens as being a result of kid-friendly depression, which… okay, boomer), but mainly because for a film that scrapes in at less than 80 minutes, it still speeds through all of its smaller points, right up to a finale that is equal parts rushed and eyeroll-worthy.

This is all over the place, both in its narrative and in its production values. It genuinely looks and sounds really damn cool, and its matter-of-fact treatment of its various ideas (the hero school, the black hole with eyes and a kaleidoscope stomach, the child torn between being an opera singer and a planetary dictator, etc.) shows more confidence than a lot of modern-day Hollywood animated films end up doing; no winking at the audience, just… this is what’s happening. But by that same token, that’d be easier to appreciate if it were able to balance how many different genres it dips its toes into. I mean, as far as superheroic treatises on our modern obsession with screens, we already have Incredibles 2.