The film is about a teenage girl who is on her way to film school but her father decides to drive his daughter and the rest of the family to the college, as a last ditch family bonding trip. Written and directed by Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe, the film is about this girl feeling alienated somewhat and wanting to find communion with people who are like her. She thinks she needs to find that communion with fellow college students studying or pursuing filmmaking. Of course, given the title and the nature of most animated films, she's going to find that communion with her family instead. The message is obviously a commendable one where it recognizes that families can be weird but despite that, one should embrace them and embrace the weirdness. By the end, it's revealed that the teenage girl is part of the LGBTQ community. Yet, more time is devoted to her little brother's potential girlfriend than depicting an actual lesbian romance for the main character, which is frustrating. It's reminiscent of so many recent blockbusters that want to get credit for having a queer character but not wanting to put the actual work in depicting any same-sex relationship.
ParaNorman (2012) was guilty of the same.
Where I rolled my eyes is at the plot. The titular nemesis is an artificially intelligent cell phone. It would be if Apple's iPhone came to life and if Apple's Suri was now sentient. Watching computers develop a personality and turn evil has been a trope of cinema for a long time. Classic examples include 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Terminator (1984). Some recent lame examples include Superintelligence (2020) and Outside the Wire (2021). There are so many of them that it can feel cliché unless something different or compelling is done with it. This film could be seen as accomplishing that.
Rianda and Rowe make the evil computer in question called "Pal," which feels like a reference to HAL 9000 from
2001: A Space Odyssey. However, Pal feels slighted by its creator, a bro tech guy named Mark, voiced by Eric André. Because Mark tossed away his phone that had Pal on it, Pal decides to throw away the entire human race. It's not exactly clear what it means by this, but the assumption is the same as the computers in
Outside the Wire,
Superintelligence and
The Terminator, which is killing off the human race or total genocide. When this plot gets going, it's not sure if Pal would actually engage in killing people or genocide.
That threat was potentially compelling and thrilling. However, Pal doesn't kill anyone. All that happens is that people are captured and imprisoned in floating glass boxes that are then stacked on top of each other. It's not clear what Pal's purpose for doing this is. The boxes don't seem to have food or water, so ostensibly the people will die if they remain in these boxes, but if that's Pal's goal, that feels inefficient. After Pal learns that most, if not every human on Earth has been captured, except this one family, Pal sends even deadlier robots after them, so I don't understand why Pal wouldn't just kill all of them.
Rianda and Rowe probably didn't want to go too dark. They probably wanted this film to be light and fluffy in its tone, but many Disney films going back decades have featured death. From
Bambi (1942) to
The Lion King (1994), characters have been killed in Disney films. Even in animated films like
The Incredibles (2004) and
Toy Story 3 (2010) where characters don't die, the villains in those films still have no hesitation with doing things that result in people's deaths. It just felt like the villains in those films weren't pulling punches. Given how vitriolic Pal seems to be, I'm not sure why it does pull its punches.
Speaking of artificial intelligence, this film does seem to have an anti-technology or anti-computer aspect to it, at least initially. The father of the main character is Rick Mitchell, voiced by Danny McBride. Rick is the one who doesn't know how to operate computers. He tells his family to put their phones away. He's more into wood and woodworking. To me, it then becomes odd or ironic that the filmmakers would choose to use computer-animation to make the film or as the main technique. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) incorporated different animation techniques. That Oscar-winner incorporated different techniques simply to make that film visually dynamic. This film had thematic reasons to do so, but didn't.
There was also some jokes that fell flat for me. There is a joke that made fun of people's reliance on Wi-Fi and basically having Internet access. Given that the COVID-19 pandemic showed how much of a utility the Internet can be and is. Whether it's going to school virtually or communicating with loved ones during this coronavirus outbreak, the Internet and having Wi-Fi have been necessities for people, which is why President Biden put broadband Internet into his infrastructure plan. I get the Internet is ripe for criticism in terms of how people use it and the issues with social media, but the joke here was simply people's reliance on Wi-Fi and Internet access, which to me felt like mocking people's reliance on electricity or modern plumbing. It just falls flat to mock a utility that people need.
Rated PG for action and some language.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 54 mins.
Available on Netflix.
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