When trailers for this film first dropped (back when it was under the far lamer title Connected), I didn’t think much of it. I mean, it looked cool and all those pug licks put a smile on my face every time they showed up, but it didn’t seem like anything all that special. Or, to put it more accurately, it didn’t seem like a film that, once it finally escaped the COVID carousel, would become one of the most popular films of the year. This thing has been getting hyped into the stratosphere for the last few months, and while lockdown brain has kept me from getting as many reviews done as I’d like, this is one I wanted to hold back on for a bit just so I could separate it from the colossal praise this has been getting. And then I watched it… and realised that everyone might have been underselling it.
It’s difficult to describe the visual style of this film without just using the word “everything”. This film has everything. The main animation work is essentially a 2D cartoon brought careening into the third dimension, with all manner of drawings, puppets, and memes thrown in to craft a style that operates a lot like Me And Earl And The Dying Girl in how it all represents the passion of its main character Katie (Abbie Jacobson). Namely, bringing all manner of quirky energy into creating visual art, which for a film all about our interactions with technology is a perfect fit.
A quick gander at the film’s robot apocalypse premise might give this the impression of one in an increasing number of wannabe commentators trying to bank on technoscepticism. What it doesn’t reveal is that, family film or no, this has one of the most unique and genuinely intelligent takes on the concept I’ve ever seen. It basically gestures at all the other forms of media that make us ponder how our technology usage affects us… and then, through the inclusion of the villain, flips the perspective and wonders how we affect increasingly-sentient technology.
The more advanced technology becomes, the more disposable it ends up being in our hands. Achievements in smartphones, smart homes, smart-anything-we-use-to-improve-quality-of-life, may be pushed for a bit by their creators, but there’s always something new around the corner. To keep up with the latest, hardware and software gets modified, upgraded, even flat-out replaced, ultimately cheapening the kind of everyday gadgets that sci-fi writers used to wet their pants at the thought of owning for themselves decades or even just a few years ago. So imagine what happens when one of those pieces of tech decides to treat us the same way we treated it.
Where this goes from poignant (and remarkably scathing about the Silicon Valley model) to outright fantastic is in how it also looks at that ‘disposable’ approach between humans… and other humans. Katie’s coming-of-age story unfolds with her wanting to go to college to pursue her filmmaking dreams, while her dad wants to get back to nature and get everyone to put their damn phones down for a second. It deals with the familial frictions in a surprisingly nuanced way, acknowledging both perspectives for what they need as well as what they need to let go of. It’s important to find your tribe, but jettisoning Family v1.0 for the more user-friendly model might not be the upgrade one would expect.
But before this gets too serious, I should probably get into this film’s biggest selling point: Its near-perfect hit-to-miss ratio for jokes. Every single line hits at just the right tone to work, to the point where there’ll be a great joke that gets immediately followed up by an even better joke (usually spoken by writer/director Mike Rianda as Katie’s brother Aaron), and the voice cast is absolutely stellar.
Jacobson in the lead is fantastic, and delivers a king hit of a line with “Don’t hide your feelings, man. That’s no way to live.” (yeah, not for nothing, but this has some of the most refreshing and subtle queer representation in recent years), Danny McBride is in rare form as the father, Maya Rudolph wields her dumpster-saving performance pedigree usually reserved for shit like The Emoji Movie and makes for one of the coolest on-screen moms I’ve seen in a very long time, and Olivia Colman as the villainous AI is both deliciously evil and remarkably sympathetic.
I don’t really know what else can be said about this film other than "Why aren’t you watching it instead of reading me ramble on?!" It’s an exceptionally fun, clever and beautiful-to-look-at serving of family-friendly animation, taking a well-worn sci-fi conceit and using it to not only drop truth bombs about family and technology, but also makes a tribute to the art of filmmaking itself. Whether it’s big-budget crowd-pleasers or silly meme-riddled YouTube vids, it’s all art, and it rarely looks better than it does here.
No comments:
Post a Comment