An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from the damned thing and I was actually planning to watch it on Disney+ but Nick, my step-son, was really eager to check it out in the movie theater. On top of that, with Pixar, there was a chance that it could turn out to be a nice surprise after all. Well, unfortunately, even though it was an original idea, the damned thing still turned out to be rather lame after all. It’s too bad because Mabel Tanaka, the main character, was just so cool and charismatic. Indeed, I loved her energic vibe, the manga connection was neat and it was probably one of my favorite characters delivered by Pixar. Furthermore, the opening scene with her grandmother was emotional and magical, the stuff that made Pixar such a legend. So, it started all right but guess what they did? Well, they took this great character and stuffed her into some robotic beaver for most of the duration. Seriously, who gave the greenlight for this half-baked idea? Indeed, the Pixar gods went for the body swap genre, one of the most idiotic and above all least entertaining genres ever, and to make things worse, they didn’t do anything interesting with this concept at all. Another bewildering choice was to constantly switch between a realistic depiction of the animals with some dead eyes and a cartoonish version of the animals when you could understand what they said. This mix was just jarring but it felt as if they knew that talking animals is also such another lame trope in animated features. The fact that all the animals could understand each other no matter the fact that they were from completely different breed was also cheap and infantilizing. Anyway, to conclude, I have to admit that it was rather harmless and I guess it is still worth a look but there is no doubt that it must be one of the most forgettable movies delivered by Pixar so far.

6/10