Mr. Peabody & Sherman

Dear Wayback Machine (a.k.a. WABAC), Plot Device,

Hate to start this letter by putting you to work, but you’re a time machine, you should have seen this coming.

Set the Wayback Machi…, er, set yourself to 1983, destination: a small French Canadian town. My childhood living room, to be precise, where, with the obvious exception of hockey, there was only one other show I could watch with my much older siblings and parents that we unanimously enjoyed. It was fast-paced, pun-filled grown-up silliness masquerading as a kids show. You’d remember it as the classic 1960s cartoon The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show.

Now set yourself to a couple of months ago, destination: my current home when I first heard about ‘Mr. Peabody & Sherman, the feature length 3D animated movie based on Peabody’s Improbable History, a popular segment of The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show where you first appeared. You’ll know you’ve found me when you hear the moribund vestiges of my childhood groan and crumble under the weight of too many unnecessary and predictably disappointing cartoon re-boots. Fun fact: it’s the same noise Jenga blocks make when falling onto a smoked-glass coffee table while an episode of C.H.I.P.S. plays in the background.

Smurfs, Transformers, Alvin and the Chipmunks, all of those were bad enough, but my beloved Peabody & Sherman? Hadn’t we learned anything from the embarrassing debacle that was the 2000 live action movie version of Rocky & Bullwinkle starring DeNiro? What’s the point of having a time-machine to go back in history if not for the express purpose to avoid repeating its mistakes?

In this case, history will show I was wrong.

Mr. Peabody is the titular genius dog, Sherman is his precocious adopted boy, and you are the time machine, Peabody’s ultimate teaching tool. When Sherman gets bullied at school by mean girl Penny and reacts violently, Mr. Peabody’s competence as a parent is called into question. An effort to restore the peace backfires when Peabody invites Penny’s parents and gruff social worker Ms. Grunion to his penthouse while Sherman and Penny make off with the Wayback Machine, eventually causing a rip in the space time continuum.

From the get-go this film seeks to reassure its longtime fans that they are indeed in good hands. The Dreamworks SKG ‘child fishing from the crescent moon’ intro is replaced by a black and white old school Sherman, an indication that despite the slick, 3D gimmickry and 21st century pacing, we are – at least tonally – on familiar ground. Ty Burrell’s Peabody is more charm than smarm in this iteration, but his penthouse, car and manner are all decidedly mid-century. Peabody’s trademark puns are groan-inducing, as they should be. They’re there not to make you laugh, but to prove that you got the reference. It’s refreshing to see a kid’s film that encourages intelligence over beauty or brawn.

Trying to appeal to both kids and adults is not an easy feat, one side usually benefits more than the other, and in this case, it’s the over 30 crowd that wins. Sherman’s Stephen Hawking lunchbox, a montage of Peabody and Sherman spending time together set to John Lennon’s ‘Beautiful Boy’, and Bill Clinton excusing Sherman’s theft of you by saying, “I’ve done worse”, are obviously not references intended for little pitchers. When the tear in the fabric of the space time continuum starts dropping famous historical figures into present day, the film veers into Bill & Ted territory: Mel Brooks’ Einstein with a Rubix cube yells at a car, “I’m walkin’ here!”, Beethoven plays Dance Dance Revolution and Leonardo DaVinci tries his hand at Banksy-esque street art. This film not-too subtly says to its younger audience, “if you don’t get it, go home and Google it.”

The themes here are simple; wanting to belong, the importance of family and standing up for what you believe in. But like most time travel films, the fun is in the journey, not the destination. If you set yourself to the movie theatre a few days ago, you’ll find my brother, his kids, and I waiting for the film to start. I’m the one with the lowered expectations. But as I watched my 7-year-old niece, the only non-teenager in her family, laugh at the jokes she got, pretend to laugh at the jokes she didn’t, and love every minute she spent with her family, I felt a strong wave of déjà vu.

Maybe history does repeat itself, and hey, you’d know.

Ever waxing nostalgic,

Di

Status: Air Mail (4/5)

The Croods

Dear John Cleese, Co-Writer,

It’s a testament to how far the digital arts have come in the last two decades that a film as mediocre as The Croods could look so beautiful. But mediocrity is only measurable against greatness. And you know a little something about greatness, don’t you, John? Your career has been defined, in large part, by the sort of unsurpassed historical successes that most performers can only dream of: founding member of the century’s greatest comedy sextet, and writer/creator of the century’s greatest sitcom.

And now you’ve given us The Croods.

 But, wait: I’m not using the term mediocre as a pejorative. Sure, mediocre is a synonym for undistinguished or unexceptional, but it’s easy to forget that distinction and exception are rare feats, and not always what art aspires to. Indeed, mediocrity has its advantages.

While mediocrity might be a foreign concept to someone like you, it’s not new to contemporary animated family films. DreamWorks Animation, in particular. One of the reasons they’ve never been able to replicate Pixar’s critical and financial success is that they don’t seem to subscribe to auteur theory. Instead, they develop their projects the same way a toy company develops new products. In the case of The Croods, you were just one of five screenwriters (and who knows how many more punch-up artists) meddling with this script. By contrast, it only took two people – you and your first wife, Connie Booth – to write every single episode of Fawlty Towers. In this sense, DreamWorks Animation is a sort of mediocrity factory; of the twenty-seven films they’ve released since 1998, only one, How To Train Your Dragon, has found the sort of unanimous acclaim Pixar regularly enjoyed in its pre-sequel heyday.

So, how did you end up mixed up with them?

My understanding is that it began with an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Twits. And from there evolved into an idea for a caveman buddy-flick. Only Hollywood’s special brand of tinkering could have mutated that into what we get onscreen in The Croods: a generic generational drama about a parent who wants one thing and a child who wants another, complete with a foul-mouthed granny, a sarcastic pet lemur, and a strong-willed, stereotype-breaking female lead character who nonetheless goes weak-kneed over a handsome fella and squeals with delight over a pair of shoes.

But I was talking about the advantages of mediocrity, wasn’t I?

Mediocrity is the inoffensive middle-ground, a soothing white noise. It’s peaceful. It requires no effort. And it has the power to surprise; it’s the short grass in which tiny triumphs can hide.

At the beginning of the otherwise middling flick is an exciting chase sequence; a family hunt that occurs with the breakneck physics of a roadrunner cartoon. There are some really breathtaking images, too: a starry sky that reminds you of the majesty of starry skies; a lush jungle that borrows liberally from the botanical imagination of Dr. Suess; an ocean of volcanic ash that ebbs and flows and makes terrific use of the widescreen aspect ratio. And, at the end, a reconciliation between father and daughter that, despite all the cloying humor and sermonizing and false tension that led up to it, might, in the moment, shake loose some dust from the rafters of the theater, which will drift down into your eyes and prompt them (against your will) to protect themselves with a discharge of saline that might (again, against your will) leak out onto your face, which will require you to very subtly (because you don’t want to disturb your companions’ enjoyment of the film) lift your hand to your eye and stealthily rub away the wetness with the knuckle of your thumb, and, later, write a strongly-worded letter to the proprietors of the theater about the thoroughness of their janitorial upkeep.

So you don’t necessarily have to feel ashamed to be associated with The Croods. You’ve given us enough greatness for two lifetimes, and there’s a place in the world for this sort of mediocre stuff. Just don’t get too comfortable down here.

Sincerely,

Jared Young 

Status: Standard Delivery (2.5/5)

Frozen

Dear Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Song Lyricist

When it comes to power couples on Broadway, you and your husband Robert Lopez are certainly the toast of the town. It makes sense that he, the two-time Tony award-winner for Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon, and you, with celebrated work on Winnie the Pooh and the Finding Nemo musical, would be hired to create the music for a film like Frozen. It also sounds a lot like, well, a Disney fairy tale. Which is only appropriate, I suppose, for an animated film that is a triumphant return-to-form for the storied company.

From the first musical notes, which evoke the tribal hymns of The Lion King, Frozen is warmly reminiscent of Disney’s animated classics. Like The Little Mermaid, it’s inspired by a Hans Christian Anderson story. It borrows elements from the Sleeping Beauty storyline. The world-building uses Beauty and the Beast’s approach to anthropomorphism, where magic can make objects talk but not animals – in this case, an aloof and ever optimistic snowman, Olaf (Josh Gadd), who also happens to be the best comic relief since Robin Williams’ Genie in Aladdin. One sequence with a snow monster even feels like it’s embracing stop-motion animation techniques from that beloved black sheep of the Disney family, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Yet even with all these comparisons, Frozen never feels derivative or parodical. Instead – and thanks to your music – it’s exactly what Disney fans have been waiting for.

The opening song “Frozen Heart” introduces us to the winter kingdom of Arendelle, with male labourers carving out blocks of ice to the rhythm of their deep baritone chants (inspired, no doubt, by Les Misérables show-opener “Look Down”). You then do a wonderful job of pushing the story along through the time-ellipsing heartbreaker “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?”, which transitions our child characters to their adult selves. The hopeful longing continues in the dueling performance of “For the First Time in Forever”, sung between two perspectives of sisters Anna (Kristen Bell) and Else (Idina Menzel). This is where even more of your eccentricities are allowed to shine through, with lyrics like “I don’t know if I’m elated or gassy, but I’m somewhere in that zone”. You also do something novel for Disney by having the characters speak in the repetitive and emphatic verbiage of teenage girls. Take this in stanza, for example:

There’ll be actual real live people
It’ll be totally strange
But wow, am I so ready for this change.

The songs just keep getting better, from the quirky sing-a-long “Love is an Open Door” to the slightly absurd but wonderfully dippy “Summer Song”. Sure, the film doesn’t have 90s-era Céline Dion or Elton John-esque power ballad, but that actually feels appropriate for a film that ultimately aims to subvert both story and song conventions whenever possible. You obviously wanted to put some distance between yourself and your predecessors Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. It works, and the film succeeds as a result.

So in that spirit, here’s hoping you and your husband can keep working in such “sync-ro-ni-city” and continue to finish each others… sandwiches. 

Sincerely,

Christopher

Status: Priority Post (4.5/5)