A GIRL AND HER ALIEN

All things being equal, I am pleased that Home didn't turn out to be the movie to kill off DreamWorks Animation. I'd have been even more pleased if Home could have managed that feat while not sucking, but then, there had to be a reason why DreamWorks ended up on a cliff's edge in the first place, and it’s fun to believe that consistently churning out exhaustingly formulaic kids' films featuring ill-chosen celebrity casts and instantly-dated music cues could be part of that reason.

That being said, even by DreamWorks standards, the celebrities in this go-round are especially awful, and the music cues particularly distracting. It's unfortunate, because the bones of a stronger film are there. It looks pretty good: favoring a calm, pastel color palette mixed with soft lines and an old-fashioned, squishy approach to character animation, all of which goes a long way to mitigating what could easily be a grim and bleak scenario. The character design is a bit questionable, particularly the humans, but humans have been the Achilles' heel of DreamWorks/PDI animated features for as long as they've existed, and the ones in Home are no more stiff and soullessly robotic than the ones in Megamind or Turbo, and quite a great deal less so than the shuffling corpses of the Shrek films. The production design, meanwhile, is downright enticing, based as it is on an alien culture made up entirely of circles and curves, leading to plenty of smooth surfaces for the eye to glide around.

A pity, then, that Home ends up centering its lovely, if a bit simplistic world (it feels more than slightly like a collection of baby toys given life) on two of the worst performances in the annals of DreamWorks - the studio that has sucked every molecule of distinguishing personality from the voices of such diverse actors as Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Michelle Pfeiffer, Ryan Reynolds, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, and Tina Fey. There's quite a wide range of talent represented by those names, but all of them are better than Jim Parsons, noted for his role on one of contemporary television's most obnoxious comedies, and Rihanna, a pop singer noted for not being an actor at all (what she was up to in Battleship I shall not dignify with the rich history that attains to the word "acting"). To be strictly fair, Parsons's performance collapses as least as much because of the wretched things screenwriters Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember have arranged for him to say as because of the choices he made in saying them, but in both cases, the effect is about the same: it takes only a few lines to grow tired of both leads and their characters, and that leaves an awful lot of movie to spend in the company of a deeply unpleasant pair of protagonists.

The hastily pencilled-in backstory - treated infinitely better in last year's prologue short film-cum-stealth trailer Almost Home - is that a race of five-legged purple aliens about a meter or less in height, the Boov, have colonised Earth as part of their longstanding strategy of running like hell across the universe to stay away from a much more powerful species called the Gorg. Our story takes place on the very day that the Boov, having shunted all the humans on the planet to a reservation in the Australian desert, are ready to take residence in the vacated human habitations of the rest of the world. Naturally enough, in this species that fetishises conformity and impersonal behavior, one and only one Boov is a happy, optimistic fuck-up, and his name is Oh (Parsons). Oh will teach us many things over the course of the movie, the chief one of which is that the children's film plot where a main character doesn’t fit into his repressive society because he’s accident-prone and non-specifically "different" isn't getting any damn fresher. But anyway, Oh manages to cross paths with Gratuity "Tip" Tucci (Rihanna), perhaps the only human who didn't end up captured and sent to Australia, and who has since focused on tracking her missing mother (Jennifer Lopez, turning in a perfectly fine and completely anonymous performance). Along for the ride is Tip's curly-tailed cat Pig, who is, in fact, one of our better cartoon cats of recent vintage, and a clear argument in Home's favor.

The scenario and world Home creates beg for a more interesting story than the latest in an infinite chain of stories where two outcasts bond despite one of them being criminally annoying (I have not read the book by Adam Rex upon which the film was based, The True Meaning of Smekday, but I gather it to be that more interesting story). And even that musty old cliché deserves better than what Parsons and Rihanna throw at it: Parsons managing to be cloyingly sweet and horrifically smug simultaneously, while stressing all the lame comic awkwardness of the tortured Yoda-ese that the writers have whipped up for him. Impressively, it never recedes into the background, no matter how much we hear of it; every new line is a fresh hell. Rihanna, at least, is just vacant; flagrantly miscast as a 12-year-old with what must be a two-pack-a-day smoking habit in order to have such a low voice, the singer speaks lines that she twists into things that absolutely sound like what happens when the director says "you're mad! you think that something is funny!", so at the very least, she correctly indicates what our emotional response is meant to be, even if the rote way she gets there makes it inordinately hard to have that response. The biggest problem is that there are points where actual Rihanna songs are played diegetically in the movie, and Rihanna singing and Rihanna talking sound exactly the same, which raises the distracting possibility that this throaty tween is also a major pop star, or maybe that she just has a tape of herself that she listens to in the car. Neither of these possibilities answer the unforgivable writing conceit that her name is Gratuity and her nickname is Tip, but I can at least imagine that kind of affectation from a pop star in the real world. Incidentally, listening to Rihanna forces Oh to discover that Boov have an irresistible tendency to dance that they never indulge in, and if the movie seems to turn into a Doomsday countdown to a random film-ending dance party at this point, congratulations on knowing your animation studios.

Oh and Tip being such unendurable traveling companions, Home is fairly well doomed as an entertaining story. The writing isn't horrible for DreamWorks - potty jokes are kept to a minimum and pop culture references are limited mostly to a tedious pun on "Busta Lime" that the writers love so much that they keep having characters within the film laugh at it, even ones who have no in-world justification for having heard of Busta Rhymes - and the story is boring and predictable down to the smallest beats, but not meaningfully harmful. It's a tragedy that the film wastes Steve Martin on a small comic role as the Boov leader, but it's not like he was trying to do anything interesting or funny with the part. So it is, really and truly, a very ordinary film in almost all respects; but those leads! They're as ordinary as dental surgery, and more than enough to turn a simple, straightforward kiddie comedy with some pretty design and more fun animation than I'd have expected from this company into a gnashing grind.

5/10

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF DREAMWORKS

I don't make a habit of pimping out what I write over at the Film Experience, but I am inordinately proud of my articles for the last two weeks: a potted history of DreamWorks Animation from 1998 to today. It's in two parts: last week, I covered 1998-2009, and today, I go the rest of the way to the present. To the future, even, since I end with the impending release of the disgusting-looking Home.

Please, go over! Enjoy! Join in the conversation!

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DEATH MARCH OF THE PENGUINS

I know you all can't wait to hear my thoughts on the week's new invisibly mediocre animated film & box office underperformer, but in order to know my thoughts on Penguins of Madagascar, you'll have to head over to The Film Experience. Or not. I mean, it's Penguins of Madagascar, it is not exactly the stuff of heady analysis and sparkling back-and-forth conversation. But that is, anyway, where my review can be found.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2001: In which rank cynicism turns out to be the thing animation needed all along

As the Hollywood Century takes us into the 21st Century and thus near to the present day, I shall find myself increasingly hard-pressed to do much good situating the films I'm discussing in any kind of historical context: we're still in that historical context, for the most part, and it will take a few more years to authoritatively state what the cinema of the early to mid-2000s begot and transformed into. But in at least one regard, I can state something with unflinching certainty: we owe the animated features of the 2000s almost solely to DreamWorks Animation's Shrek.

The film began life simply enough, as yet another of Jeffrey Katzenberg's "fuck you so hard" gestures to his old boss and nemesis Michael Eisner; their rivalry fueled the creation of the animation studio that Katzenberg had tried to use to out-Disney Disney, beginning with 1998's dramatic musical The Prince of Egypt, DreamWorks' second feature (their first, Antz from earlier in the same year was a more petulant but also lower-key "fuck you" to Disney's handmaidens at Pixar). But DreamWorks was unlucky: by 1998, the gas had just about run out on the Disney Renaissance, and it was starting to take with it people's enthusiasm for seeing animated movies. As far as trying to copy Disney's playbook, the game was up: The Prince of Egypt was a hit, but the next three traditionally-animated projects DreamWorks released, between 2000 and 2003, remain their lowest-grossing trio of films, even today.*

But it playing catch-up to Disney was proving to be a non-starter, the studio was soon to find vastly more success in simply insulting Katzenberg's old studios right to its face. And that brings us to the second DreamWorks animated film, and in some ways its all-time signature title: Shrek birthed three sequels that remain the peak of the studio's popular output. The four Shreks are, at the time of this writing, the four highest-grossing films DreamWorks has ever made (and given the studio's recent fortunes, they're likely to remain that way for years to come). Shrek itself was the highest-grossing animated film since Disney's own The Lion King in 1994, which must have delighted the shit out of Katzenberg: that smash hit was the last Disney release during his tenure as chairman. It also kept itself just ahead of Pixar's Monsters, Inc. from later in 2001, and managed to beat that same film for the first-ever Best Animated Feature Oscar.

Such success breeds imitators, so what, then, are we imitating? Shrek is a fairy tale, basically, directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, and adapted by a consortium of writers (Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio and Joe Stillman and Roger S.H. Schulman) from William Steig's children's book. But a fairy tale that self-consciously up-ends the normal morality: the handsome prince is an ugly little meanspirited shit named Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow), the monster is the grumpy ogre Shrek (Mike Myers), who turns out to be the hero, and the damsel in distress is Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz), who knows wire-fu, has a calculating sense of her own worth, and turns into a hideous ogre herself when the sun goes down. The irritating comic sidekick is still the irritating comic sidekick: a talking Donkey played by Eddie Murphy, far less disastrously then when he played the same type in Disney's Mulan three years earlier.

"It's a traditional fairy tale only everything is subverted" gets us pretty far along the road to seeing how this is a parody of Disney's stock in trade, but just to make sure we totally get it, the filmmakers place Farquaad's palace behind a thick layer of satirising Disneyland with the cheery, sanitised, ugly castle of Dulac (they also open the movie with Disney-style storybook pages that the title character uses to wipe his ass, but I'd prefer not to linger there). And the "it's a small world" parody that beats that dead horse one last time is, I confess, my favorite gag in all of Shrek, though I also confess that ranking all the Shrek gags that I like doesn't take all that long.

For the thing that Shrek truly gave unto the world was not a spate of savage takedowns of Disney tropes - Disney was doing quite fine doing that in its fumbling incompetence that marked most of its output at that time (ironically, Disney wouldn't regain its footing as a powerhouse until it firmly and enthusiastically embraced the tropes that Shrek was making fun of so hard, with 2010's enormously square Tangled). It was, rather, the tone of Shrek that suddenly exploded as fully-rendered CG animated films became omnipresent in the following years, owing to the huge successes of DreamWorks and Pixar at exactly the time Disney's traditional animation was imploding. And the tone of Shrek is pop culture references, lots of pop songs driving montages - and the introduction of the infamous "film-ending dance party" trope, soon to become the worst bane to storytelling ever known to the animated feature - cutesy cutaways from dirty language, jokes pitched at the target audience's parents that don't even pretend to be for kids (seriously, "Farquaad"? Especially since Myers's arbitrary Scottish accent gives him some trouble enunciating it, and you can always hear the "fuckwad" he's struggling so hard not to say). And farts. So, so many farts. Shrek's function as a character, especially in the first third of the movie, is almost solely to provide a full array of gross-out humor, but even with a gamut of everything from ear wax to shit to body odor, the writers always retrench to the easy comfort of farts.

It was, too, in Shrek that the gambit of casting famous people and selling the movie on their names first paid off in a big way. Pixar had attracted heavy hitters like Tom Hanks and Tim Allen at the peak of his sitcom fame and Bonnie Hunt, the young people's favorite, but there was always the sense that they were chosen as actors first, celebrities second. But in Shrek, besides the proven success of Eddie Murphy as a fast-talking con artist and Mike Myers doing funny voices, gave us Cameron Diaz as an animated princess - Cameron Diaz! Who the fuck can remember what her voice sounds like when they're not actually hearing her talk? How is she an appropriate choice for casting an animated film? The simple answer is that she's not, and Princess Fiona is boring as hell and has no personality to speak of. John Lithgow is the only person trying to do anything interesting, and he's still just playing the typical Lithgow arrogant fussbudget.

This is, all of it, pretty dire stuff; the sarcastic, nasty tone of smug hipness clashes mightily with the film's shrill attempts at sincerity and lesson-learning, forced scenes of "I just want to be understood" plugged in exactly where the formula expects it, clearly not because the filmmakers particularly believe in it. And far too much of the knowing, in-jokey humor is stale and unfunny, ghastly now where it was merely dumb in 2001. Compounding all of this is how barbarically ugly the whole thing is: the Shrek films have always been the most unpleasantly designed in DreamWorks' stable, with their wave after wave of human characters who look like corpses given movement with rod puppetry that exaggerates all their gestures. But beyond the dead-looking, stretched flesh and emotionless faces, there's so much technical flatness that has only magnified over time, not that Shrek looked as good as its competition in '01. The cloth moves stiffly and has no texture; Donkey's hair is rigid and plasticine, and this in the same year as Monsters, Inc. and its groundbreaking fluffy hair. That film still looks terrific after 13 years: the backgrounds are a bit flat, maybe, and the animation of the little human girl's face leaves plenty to be desired, but it's still appealing and visually deep. Shrek, in 2014, is embarrassing to look at: you could throw a dart in a video game store and find something with better character movement and photorealistic rendering.

This, in fact, might very well be why Shrek generated so many note-for-note imitators: it proved that crappy jokes, sugar-addled music (Smash Mouth, where art thou?), and famous people cashing a check to sound like they're dashing off their lines on the way to dinner, are somehow appealing enough that it doesn't take significantly technical finesse to turn a profit. The lesson of Pixar is that CG animation could be big business if you have unfathomable talent and state-of-the-art resources; the lesson of DreamWorks is that CG animation can be even bigger business if you have marketing know-how and shameless in appealing to the worst side of children's natures. Not all of Shrek's immediate effects are still being felt - generally, more effort is put into character design than this ugly sonofabitch ever shows, and the climactic dance parties are largely a thing of the past - but its calculating, intensely mediocre approach to animated storytelling is with us still, strong and durable as ever, and with every Ice Age 17 and Despicable Me 8, the shadow of DreamWorks' flatulent ogre grows just a tiny bit longer.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2001
-A pair of multinational fantasy adaptations light it up at the box office, with the Chris Columbus-helmed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring topping the charts
-Wes Anderson's fussy aesthetic blooms into full flower with the doll's house inhabited by The Royal Tenenbaums
- Steven Spielberg shepherds the final vision of the late Stanley Kubrick in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, to the admiration of the few and the hostile bafflement of many more

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2001
-The Hindi-language Lagaan is an enormous international sensation, rare for Indian cinema
-The international success of Danis Tanović's No Man's Land throws light on the youthful Bosnian film industry
-Austrian miserabilist Michael Haneke explores the dark side of soul-destroying violent sex in The Piano Teacher

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RETURN OF THE DRAGON

There's one very specific thing happening in How to Train Your Dragon 2 that would cause me to kind of love it a bit even if it the rest of it was a crashing failure instead of a small disappointment. Which it is, unfortunately; still one of the top handful of movies ever made by DreamWorks Animation, but pretty much across-the-board weaker than the original How to Train Your Dragon from 2010, except in the natural evolution of animation technology over the course of four years (though just the technology - I'm actually of the opinion that both the animation and design have taken a discernible step back).

But anyway, that specific thing, which is one of the boldest and most daring things that a major American animated feature has down in a really long time: the film is full of background action. That doesn't sound impressive, so maybe I'm saying it wrong. The thing is, there's a human plot in HTTYD2, and it is perfectly fine and a very ambitious and sincere effort to increase the scope and conflict of HTTYD1, and writer-director Dean DeBlois is unquestionably a good and attentive handmaiden to keep this franchise growing in ever grander and more epic directions, if that's the sort of thing you want. Anyway, while this human plot is going about its business in the foreground, the whole movie is amazingly dense with background action, much of it centered on the dragon Toothless, who immediately became, in my not-remotely-humble opinion, one of the most adorable and appealing animated characters in recent memory upon his premiere in the '10 film. There are a lot more featured dragons this time around, with names and personalities that go above and beyond anything in the first movie, none of them nearly as ridiculously lovable as Toothless, but that's not the point. The point is, there is much interaction between Toothless and these dragons, or between dragons and the environment, or between dragons and humans, and a great deal of it happens behind the main action. It's not commented on, and we're not "supposed" to pay attention to it - it's not one of those things where the conversation happening in the foreground is banal nonsense so as to not distract us from the hijinks going on in the back row. It's really just filigree, decoration that's there if you want to notice it but completely disposable if you don't.

That's probably not something to really be all that excited by, except that it's such a rarity in films of this sort, and it's honestly quite impressive in its needlessness. Animation is labor intensive; animation doesn't favor putting stuff in that doesn't ultimately serve a purpose of some kind. So it's a wonderful sign of the filmmakers' passion that HTTYD2 pays so much attention to things whose usefulness is so abstract. For these little gestures are useful: they flesh out the world and remind us that everything doesn't hit the pause button when the heroes hash out the plot; the acknowledge that there's a lot of pleasure in these films in the simple act of watching the dragons move and play in their cat-influenced (and increasingly dog-influenced, in this film) body language. It's a little detail that works splendidly; and what is great cinema, but the accumulation of a sufficient number of little details?

Now, this particular film does not have that sufficient number of details to round the corner to "great cinema", though I'd be inordinately hard-pressed to define any of it as "bad", or even to explain in any kind of rational terms why I felt let down by what is by all means a strong animated fantasy adventure. DeBlois - working without partner Chris Sanders for the first time ever, while Sanders is off making The Croods into a franchise for DreamWorks - has very clear designs on how to expand the universe established in the first movie, and insofar as that's the goal, he's tremendously successful in carrying it of. Taking up five years after the first movie, we find that the viking island stronghold of Berk is now dominated by dragon riders, and the village knows a level of peace and prosperity unimaginable at any other point in its history. This has given local hero Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) plenty of time to take his beloved dragon companion Toothless out into the wide sea to draft new and more detailed maps, to the irritation of his father, Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler), who's desperately trying to groom his son to become the next chief of Berk.

Things are about to get bad, of course, as they do; one on his his flights, Hiccup discovers an unknown power has been gathering together dragons to form an army and take over the entire world, or at least that part of it known to the Northern European peoples. The leader of this force is Drago Bludvist (Djimon Hounsou), a former enemy of Stoick's, and Hiccup's hope that a peaceful resolution can be found is greeted by the viking chief with no enthusiasm; when the boy attempts to go out on his own to broker peace, he ends up running across the mysterious dragonmaster Valka (Cate Blanchett), who fully agrees with Stoick's opinion, and meanwhile hopes to do all she can to protect as many dragons as possible in an ice-covered sanctuary. She's also Hiccup's long-lost mother, so that adds a fun wrinkle to the whole thing.

It's a sprawling thing, with lots of big fantasy action of the sort that lots of computers and a PG rating can facilitate, and a huge story of high stakes and civilisation-wide conflict, and somewhere in all of that, the human element that made the first movie so freakishly charming and wonderful has gotten completely lost. This isn't a movie that knows much what to do with its characters: Hiccup is forced securely into a generic Hero's Journey narrative that the series could have done just as fine without (and Baruchel's shrill whine, so perfect last time, has abruptly become a significant liability for the character), and in its zeal to make sure that stock arc is treated with the most gravity possible, the film sidelines everybody else, no matter how interesting it feels like they could be - Valka, in particular, is a terrific, dynamic figure, voiced by Blanchett with warm authority and strength, and basically after she arrives to elbow the plot in the right direction, she never gets anything else to do, despite having a skill set that the remainder of the story would seem to be able to take advantage of multiple times in multiple ways (it's worth pointing out that the script originally had Valka as the villain, to be redeemed in the end, and Drago was to show up in the third movie. I don't know when this change happened, but it was far enough along that the structure wasn't able to completely recover - Drago is left a dreadfully underdeveloped and unthreatening threat, and the momentum throughout is all over the place).

Of course, nothing's wrong with any of this: it's a grand, imposing spectacle, if a little too elaborate for its own good at times (Drago's army is implausibly large and well-stocked), with well-staged action scenes that make full use of the broad canvas permitted by animation and characters who can fly. It's a handsome movie, the most polished and realistic in DreamWorks's canon, thought that realism comes at a price: the character designs have all gotten a bit less rubbery and likable than they were before (mostly in the way of textures and hair - boy, are the filmmakers ever fucking proud of Stoick's mustache, it gets almost as many close-ups as any of the other characters). And John Powell's score, reusing cues from the last film alongside a few new ones, is extravagantly robust and overwhelming, like the best of Maurice Jarre and James Horner rolled up together.

But epic grandeur isn't any replacement for the scene in the first movie of Hiccup gently, patiently causing Toothless to creep nearer to him; it doesn't excuse the way that all of the supporting characters have been thrust into an idiotic love quadrangle plot and denuded of the comic relief elements that were their primary reason for existing in the first place (this is, in fact, a surprisingly non-funny movie, for an American animation). How to Train Your Dragon 2 is beautiful and imposing; but it's also a bit remote. The best moment in the movie, by far, is a tentative, then ebullient dance between Stoick and Valka, reunited after 20 years; the second best is all tangled up in spoilers, but it involves a stately, meaningful farewell to one of the characters to kick off the last act. These are both character moments to the bone; they're moments that are in dismayingly short supply throughout the movie as a whole. It's rich and involved storytelling, largely beautiful to look at, and I'll never say no to a chance to revisit the franchise's intoxicatingly well-executed dragon animation, but a little heart and soul got lost on the way to grandeur and weight and scale.

7/10

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TIME SINK

The first surprise - ah, hell, it's the only surprise, let's be honest - is that Mr. Peabody & Sherman is not terribly good, but it's not terribly good in the way that DreamWorks Animation features tend to not be terribly good. That is to say, it's not a hell-spawned devouring nightmare that leave nothing but charred remains of the characters first premiered in 1959 during the "Peabody's Improbable History" segment of producer Jay Ward's variably-named Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, mocking all that is good and decent about animation that actually tries to be creative and intellectually engaging simply by the fact of its existence.

Instead it's just another damn DreamWorks movie with vaguely unpleasant, angular human character designs, a severe problem with eyes that look like glassy marbles with no personality behind them, bright colors over every vaguely rubberised surface. It does almost entirely without pop culture jokes, which is great, because the ones it comes up with are unfathomably dated (Zumba! Planking!); instead, it makes do with a number of fart- and shit-related jokes that makes me realise quite suddenly how much such things had been slowly disappearing from children's entertainment. Also, if you are looking for a reason to proclaim that the movie has brutally violated the heart and soul of the Ward cartoon from 50 years ago, you can hardly do better than point to the gag where it looks like the Trojan Horse is crapping out Greek warriors.

It also does mostly without gratingly obvious celebrity voice casting, the single most recognisable member of the cast probably being Patrick Warburton, who at this point counts more as a good-luck charm for animation casting agents than anything else; Stephen Colbert, Allison Janney, Mel Brooks, Lake Bell, Leslie Mann, and Stanley Tucci are among the other folks in the cast, none of them obviously there for their marquee value. Which isn't the same as saying that the cast is necessarily good; but they could have gone to some much worse places than they did. For which it is well to be thankful.

Anyway, the film itself, a profoundly difficult thing to discuss in any way; too dull and mediocre to be interesting or interestingly bad, it is the most product-like piece of studio product that I have watched in what feels like a long time. We are first introduced to the world's smartest dog, Mr. Peabody (Ty Burrell), who quickly sketches the details of his life: he is the adopted father of a human boy, Sherman (Max Charles), and to ensure the child's education, he has invented a time machine called the WABAC. The two visit historical events and learn from them, while modestly or immodestly interacting with the historical players; and now Sherman is about to attend public school, where his inflated knowledge puts him at an academic advantage but a profound social disadvantage. Having gotten into a fight with tiny queen bee Penny Peterson (Ariel Winter) on the very first day, Sherman's future with a dog father is called into question by shrill social worker Ms. Grunion (Allison Janney), and hoping to quietly paper everything over, Mr. Peabody invites Penny's parents (Stephen Colbert and Leslie Mann) over for an exquisitely prepared dinner. During that dinner, Sherman and Penny end up traveling into the past and she gets lost in Egypt; thus an adventure begins, during which the adoptive father learns how to be more generous with his affections and allow the pleasant messiness of family life to creep into his immaculately composed domestic situation.

It's difficult to say which is more vexing: the strangely insistent "learn how to be a closer, more loving dad" theme, which can hardly be of primary interest to the child audience that the film obviously presumes for itself, or the descent into clattertrap science fiction boilerplate about rifts in the space-time continuum that turns the film's final act into something that is neither funny nor heartwarming like the rest of it tries to be, sometimes even succeeding. Both, at any rate, suggest that Mr. Peabody & Sherman began production and ended it without any clear sense of what it was supposed to be about and how: certainly, the notion that it was actually just supposed to be a redone version of a cartoon whose cultural cachet is certainly not at a high ebb with the children of the 2010s is quickly dashed, given that "Peabody's Improbable History" never came within a country mile of the twee sentiment of this film, with its vastly more prickly Peabody and the strong impression that Sherman was his human pet, not his adopted son. Though I will credit the film with this much: it manages some fine puns in homage to the groaning, tortured set-ups that were the original's raison d'être, and one - "You can't have your cake, and edict too" - could have come from one of the best of the 1960s shorts. Even if the film stomps all over it by having a Sherman who flatly declares "I don't get it" instead of adopting the justifiable look of disgust and shame with which the original Sherman typically responded to Peabody's jokes.

Beyond its ability or not to evoke a brand-name whose natural audience would consist primarily, I suspect, of people in their 60s, Mr. Peabody & Sherman is otherwise a film of the most steadily generic sort, no doubt a good exercise for DreamWorks's artists and technicians (it is a bright film and not unpleasant to look at, though the characters are somewhat more grotesque than expressive - the backgrounds, however, are generally breathtaking, contemporary New York and Renaissance Florence especially) to keep their talents sharpened for whatever more prestigious and ambitious project is coming down the line, but not something that cares to indulge in more than the most basic factory-produced CG animation. On the whole, it is less obnoxious than the studio's 2013 Turbo, but also less idiosyncratic and visually bent than their last March release, The Croods. It is perfectly safe, fitfully amusing, increasingly dull as it goes on, and hugely uninspired in virtually every way that an animated film can lack inspiration (there's a montage that's actually rather neat, using flatter, more impressionistic color and shading than the rest of the film, but it mostly calls attention to how limited the creativity is anywhere else). It is the sort of film where watching it and napping through it are both more or less equally pleasant, and in both cases it's a little difficult to remember anything about the experience once you're done with it.

5/10

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SLOW DOWN, YOU MOVE TOO FAST

2013 has been a remarkably mediocre year for American animated features, but even in the company of Monsters University and Despicable Me 2, there's something special about Turbo, the second and final DreamWorks Animation project of the year (following The Croods, which is starting to look like an elder statesman). It is mediocre; unabashedly so. But it's more than just that; it is aggressive, poisonous in its mediocrity, not just denuded of imagination and creativity but openly contemptuous of the idea of such things. It's so mediocre, so proud of how much it dislikes itself, that it's downright mean. I think what pushes it over the edge is the casting of Hollywood's current favorite Asian, Ken Jeong, as a tiny, sassy old Chinese woman, it apparently being the case that the only thing that Jeong could possibly do to become more goddamnably irritating than he has been was to double-down on sexism to help flavor his minstrelsy.

The film is not, as you would certainly be led to believe by the concept, DreamWorks's outright carbon copy of Pixar's Cars. Indeed, the rival studio has taken a much classier route here: Turbo is an outright carbon copy of Ratatouille. A small animal wants to do something that small animals oughtn't be able to do, he is encouraged because of the slogan of a famous French-accented practitioner of that same art, his relatives mock him and want him to come back to reality (Turbo condenses the crabby father and dim brother into one figure, the crabby brother), he ends up joining forces with a somewhat dream-addled human who speaks to him using a cutesy nickname and a vaguely simpering tone of voice. All that's missing are the consummate artistry, a pulverising emotional climax, and likable characters.

Anyway, the film follows Theo (Ryan Reynolds), a garden snail living in a tomato patch in a Los Angeles neighborhood, whose overriding desire is to drive a racecar, like his hero, French-Canadian Indy 500 champion Guy Gagné (Bill Hader), who always sagely notes, "no dream is too big, and no dreamer is too small". Theo's brother Chet (Paul Giamatti) is the cold voice of reason, but when Theo goes wandering on a particular despondent night, he ends up falling into the engine block of a car in a street race, and is saturated in nitrous as a result, which turns him into a mutant with all the abilities of a car: headlights, car alarm, radio, and the ability to buzz around at 200 miles per hour. When he inevitably fucks up and gets himself and Chet thrown out of the snail community, they end up falling in with a group of non-mutant racing snails who are kept by the impossibly bored shopowners in an impossibly low-rent Van Nuys strip mall. One of these, starry-eyed taqueria employee Tito (Michael Peña), immediately sees how this magnificently fast snail can be a great attraction to draw clients to the mall, begins to plan a great scheme to win acclaim and fame for him and his friends. Before you can say, "God, are you sure this is only 96 minutes long?", Theo - now calling himself Turbo - has managed to secure a spot in the Indy 500, on the grounds that the rules don't say a snail can't race.

Paint-by-numbers, yeah, but that's not the problem here. In fact, I admire the grace notes by which Turbo attempts to not be so ridden with clichés; the unconventional choice of location, undoubtedly motivated by the street racing scene in Los Angeles, already gives the film enough of a unique set of characters (when was the last time that most of the prominent characters in a wide-release animated movie were voiced by non-white actors? Ever?) that it stands out on that front, even if it's not entirely to the film's credit: no polyglot Van Nuys mixed-race neighborhood, no Kim Ly, the cringely rancid Jeong character. But also no Michelle Rodriguez riffing on her The Fast and the Furious character, and if I have to have the former, I am glad it's tempered by the latter.

No, the problem is more dire than being creatively uninspired: it's uninspiring, with no characters who are easy to like, either in design (other than making them all fluffy cartoon colors, no real attempt is made to make the snails not look like snails, and they're just not appealing animals), or in characterisation and performance. Reynolds has such a smarmy voice; good for his character in The Croods, dreadful for his earnest dreamer here. And with so many side characters to keep track of - besides Turbo, Chet, and Tito, there are five other slugs and four other humans who count as "major" even before we get to the lazy choice to put Guy Gagné in the film in the flesh, whereupon he turns out to be a loathsome villain (frankly, I think that if nothing were changed about the film other than making him a decent man, a driven competitor and fair sport, Turbo would be so much radically better than it is as to be unrecognisable) - nobody has any chance to break out. All the time the movie has to spare on characterisation is "oh, this one is Samuel L. Jackson, so he's sardonic", or "this short, oddly Harvey Fierstein-looking fellow is Luis Guzmán, so you know he's easily flustered and cowardly", and while that's the studio's all-time favorite trick, it's rarely worked less effectively than it does in Turbo, which ends up populated by notions of characters rather than characters themselves, and the dismal interplay between Reynolds and Giamatti does not remotely cut it as far as giving us anybody to root for.

It's too bad that the thing sucks so hard as a character-driven narrative, because it's actually fairly handsome looking; there's a shot of Turbo/Theo looking mournfully over US-101 and all the cars blurring past that's as beautiful as anything in any animated film this year, and the neon details on the snails (don't ask) are entirely pleasing to the eye. The whole thing is as technically accomplished as anything DreamWorks has ever made (the humans are every bit as solid as How to Train Your Dragon, the studio's current standard-bearer in that direction), and if technique were the sole reason we went to watch cartoons, I'd have little to say against it. But we also go for heart and brains, and Turbo has absolutely none of either. It's as soulless as anything in this barbaric year for animated pictures, and then some.

4/10

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