Animation - especially feature film animation - has never been in a better place than it is right now. To the point where the Disney/Pixar machine can be enjoying their best creative streak in decades (if not ever) and yet even their fine-tuned story machines like Zootopia, Soul and Raya and the Last Dragon wind up feeling somewhat upstaged by films like Your Name, Wolfwalkers, and - now - The Mitchells vs. The Machines.
It probably won't surprise you to learn that animation production super-duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller (directors of The Lego Movie and two of the ringleaders of Into the Spider-verse) were behind this recent eye-popping, heart-warming, rapid-fire joke machine. Sony Animation has seen a serious upgrade since the days of The Emoji Movie, it would seem. Previously titled Connected, Mitchells is a first-rate example of "a movie getting interrupted by another movie in a different genre" (see also: swashbuckling sorcery literally invading the romantic period drama of the first Pirates of the Caribbean), and runs with both concepts as far as it possibly can.
Opening as 18-year-old Katie Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson) is about to leave for film school across the country from her well-meaning but clumsy family, we're quickly introduced to her loving luddite father, Rick (Danny McBride); her dinosaur-obsessed brother, Aaron (Michael Randa) and her "level-headed" mother, Linda (Maya Rudolph) - who's carrying enough anxiety about the slowly-fracturing family dynamic (especially compared to seemingly perfect neighbors) to break the backs of several camels. As you can see, writer-directors Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe craft a solid base for a "bonding with my family over a cross-country road trip/coming of age" yarn in the mold of A Goofy Movie only to crash a high-speed robot uprising into proceedings and revel in the mayhem. When a careless tech mogul unleashes AI Armageddon by phasing out the wrong Smart Phone OS (don't **** with Siri), it's up to the lovable misfit family to hit the gas and save the world.
It speaks to the film's quality that I'd have been perfectly happy watching the road movie even if the robot apocalypse movie never happened (because we'd still have Monchi the dog, and Monchi is the best), because one of the smartest moves that The Mitchells pulls early on is not making the strains on the family any one person's fault. The central father/daughter rift grows not because of a single melodramatic poor choice, but because (as the film establishes via Melancholy Home Movies) Katie and Rick were so in-sync when she was younger that they literally don't know how to work for their communication because they didn't have to until recently. The other smart choice is that the movie doesn't take the easy sides in the expected "technology BAD, kids!" vs. "you just don't understand, OLDS!" struggle. Instead, the film opts to push for synthesis, responsibility, and self-actualization as through creativity and empathy - and stresses that it's not enough to simply listen close enough just to say the right things, you have to do the work behind the words.
The third brilliant choice the movie makes is to write a butt-ton of hilarious jokes and cram as many of them into the film as possible, often anchoring them as well-planted payoffs to earned character beats so that a cascade of chuckles and guffaws escalates to the point where the film pays off a freaking Kill Bill reference and then you're desperately gasping for air. There's just so many, and they're so good.
But all the manic energy isn't just for eye candy or blink-and-you'll-miss-it gags (though there are plenty and they're very good). The film's exaggerated "scribbling in the margins" art style (a combination of watercolor affect, subtle "comic book" character outlines, and 2D animated effects and inserts) not only differentiate it from the "refined-to-a-mirror-sheen" animation of modern Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks, but signpost that - combined with the voice-over narration and Katie's DIY filmmaking style - the entire film is her artistic processing of this experience. Because of that, the precision-strike emotional beats that Rianda and Rowe carefully build to hit like a train, often in the middle of an eye-popping visual sequence or between gut-busting punchlines.
It's very early in the year to be talking about favorites, animated or otherwise, but let's just say that 2021 has already set an unexpectedly high bar.
(The Mitchells vs. The Machines is streaming on Netflix)
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