Paul (2011)

Director: Greg Mottola

Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Seth Rogen, Jason Bateman

Have I Seen It Before?: Certainly.

Did I like it?: It feels fundamentally unfair, but when Pegg and Frost headline a film, one can’t help but long for Edgar Wright to be at the helm of the film. They should be allowed to work on their own projects, right?

Also, I can’t help but feel that as Simon Pegg becomes more and more successful with mainstream audiences that his nerd credibility has also become diminished.

But to judge the film on its actual merits, and not some artificial sense of its context among other films…

To its credit, the special effects are pretty subtly great. Nearly ten years after the release, Paul (voiced by Rogen) remains a fairly believable CGI creature. That’s no small feat. Greg Mottola is fine as director, and the whole film works as an innocuous comedy. And yet, the whole film never quite launches past the orbit of other American films of the last fifteen years or so (call it the Apatow era, if that helps). It also trucks in dread “reference rumor,” that same style of writing that fueled “The Big Bang Theory” through 912 seasons. Here it is supposed to be enough that much of the film takes place at Sand Diego ComicCon, but the context of why we appreciate the things celebrated there isn’t quite there. Somebody like Edgar Wright would have made one of the best close encounter movies of all time, and it would be thoroughly amusing as something of an afterthought.

I guess I did manage to find a way to bring the specter of Edgar Wright back into this review. I guess I’m still irate that he was chased off of Ant-Man (2015) is all.

But, again, that doesn’t really talk about this film, does it? The script came from Simon Pegg (and Frost), who wrote those superlative Cornetto films, you’d think something would leak in, but it again, remains just a comedy. Had Pegg and Frost not been in the film at all, I probably wouldn’t be thinking along these lines at all.

Zootopia (2016)

Director: Byron Howard, Rich Moore

Cast: Ginnifer Goodwin*, Jason Bateman, Idris Elba, Jenny Slate

Have I Seen It Before?: Never. But it has been on in the background during a series of facetime calls with my niece (or as she calls it, “FOXES!”), so I figured I needed to get with the times.

Did I like it?: I may be further showing my age by still being of a mind that films produced by Disney animation and not Pixar are somehow less than. It was certainly true back in the 90s and the 00s, but ever since John Lasseter** bridged the divide between the two animation houses, maybe Pixar films have been a little less special (not bad, just less special), and regular Disney pictures have increased in quality by quantum leaps. Wreck It Ralph (2012) immediately comes to mind.

The disparity in quality is just not there anymore, even as Lasseter’s era has come to an end. And so, Zootopia presents all of the visual inventiveness and humor we have come to expect from the mouse house. Far more interestingly, the world is an interesting speculative premise. What if the various animals of the world all evolved into a humanlike society? How would creatures that were once predators and prey come to interact with one another? Would they have nudity taboos? It’s a lot to take in for a kids movie. It leaves even larger questions that I’m not sure could fuel a sequel, but I keep thinking about a day after I watched the movie. Are there humans in this world? Did they not evolve? Do the species intermarry? It sure seems like Judy (Goodwin) and Nick (Bateman) seem to be awfully nice friends at the end of the film, but they can’t possibly have children, right?

Have I gotten to the point where I’m no longer in the right mindset for a bright colorful movie about talking animals? That’s probably the most pressing question of all.

*The role felt tailor made for someone like Amy Poehler, but Inside Out (2015) probably negated that possibility. It was only after looking up the stats on the film in anticipation of this review that I realized Judy was played by the ill-fated first Mrs. Cash. It’s a testament to the performance that it wasn’t immediately recognizable as someone, unlike the performances of either Bateman, Elba, or Slate.

** I know… It’s good for the culture that he is gone now, and it’s even better that he’s only kind of been able to land his golden parachute in the safe havens of Skydance Animation. But its impossible to deny that the man had an impact on the quality of animated movies over the last twenty-five years.