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Laika continues to create highly impressive visual worlds in Missing Link, but their elaborate dioramas feel incomplete this time around. There’s a great idea, likable characters, but a general sense of the various parts not quite coming together as they should. This is the weakest effort from the studio to date.
Still, their weakest effort is better than many major studios middling efforts. Ignoring that the humor in Missing Link never quite comes together, there’s a pleasingly twee and polite sense of lunacy here. Picture Wes Anderson making a Looney Tunes cartoon and you’re somewhere in the ballpark of what’s charming and why it doesn’t entirely work.
Sir Lionel Frost (Hugh Jackman) wants in on an exclusive explorer’s club and sets about trying to obtain proof, if not outright capture, various cryptids to get his bona fides. He gets wind of a Big Foot in the pacific northwest and sets out to bring it back to the club, except the Big Foot (Zach Galifianakis) contacted him to help him reunite with his kind. Off they set for Shangri-La in search for the yetis, the Big Foot’s distant cousins, all the while they’re being chased by Lord Pigget-Dunceb (Stephen Fry), his hitman (Timothy Olyphant), and joined by Adelina Fortnight (Zoe Saldana), a fellow would-be adventurer.
The best creation to come out of the movie is Susan Link, the titular missing link. Underneath that monstrous façade is a sad, lonely creature looking for love and acceptance and a child-like penchant for taking things literally. Stuffed into an ill-fitting suit for the much of the movie, Link is an adorable little creation that would demand an onslaught of toyetic merchandise if released by a competitive studio. Galifianakis’ voice work also finds the right balance between whimsical and genuine pathos.
The rest of the characters, save for Emma Thompson’s xenophobic and pretentious leader of the yetis, are sweet but largely unmemorable creations. They’re fun to spend time with but don’t last in the imagination as well as Coraline, Norman, Kubo, or the boxtrolls. This film, in particular, feels more concerned with having you embrace its highly detailed production design and quirky body shapes. There’s a lot of artisanal warmth swimming through your vision but it doesn’t add up to too much of a story.
Laika loves to highlight the impressive, aching work that goes into crafting their movies with time-lapses, but all that effort doesn’t always translate to imaginative, immersive tales. The terror of Coraline, the empathy of ParaNorman, the healing trauma of Kubo and the Two Strings – all of them have something strong and beautiful undergirding their elaborate milieus and tactile wonderlands. Missing Link is frustratingly almost there but not quite.
