‘Smallfoot’ review: A Mountain of pleasant surprises

It is quite a disservice to the scope of compelling ideas that Karey Kirkpatrick and Jason Reig’s Smallfoot unabashedly offers that it looks so run-of-the-mill.

So far, so good

At first glance, the animated film, which opens with a lackluster song number that rivals the blindingly colorless opener of Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee’s Frozen (2013), seems as bereft of original ideas as the mountain village the mythical yetis live in is bereft of green. The jokes and visual gags do result in giggles, but there is always that nagging feeling that you’ve heard them before probably in another CGI cartoon made several months back.

Everything adorably works to the calculated joy of children who will most probably delight in seeing white and fluffy gentle giants dance around, burst into song, or be propelled into the air to bonk their sorry heads onto noisy gongs. The songs so far are treacly treats, with Channing Tatum, voicing the lead yeti named Migo, sounding like a backstreet boy in his opening solo and Zendaya, voicing Migo’s love interest, musically murmuring about the thrill of discovery in her forgettable anthem.

Everything is just cute and dandy. So far, so good, it’s regrettably boring.

In fact, Smallfoot doesn’t get its deliciously disruptive footing until its human, a National Geographic-type TV host named Percy and voiced by James Corden, is introduced.

What’s interesting about the cartoon’s human character is that, as opposed to the torturously contented yetis, he is disillusioned and ready to surrender to more surreptitious means to get his fame and fortune back. He laments of his missed mortgage payments and the rising popularity of memes and viral videos which led to his career plummeting to the point of him wanting to fake his features.

His song, an appropriation of Queen’s Under Pressure, to reveal the motivations behind his sudden desire to dupe his fans, is not just hilarious, it is also compelling in the sense that it approximates the dehumanizing pressures of show business.

It gets better

Then all of a sudden, Smallfoot gets better, exponentially.

The cartoon finally achieves that discreet balance between the cutesy antics that children adore and the more compelling stuff that makes all the colorful nonsense tolerable for adults.

The initial interaction between Migo and Percy is an uproarious comedy of errors, with two soon-to-be best buds wrestling hysterically or echoing the hilariously wrong messages to each other. Their eventual understanding through gestures that connect their discordant languages, however, is quietly affecting.

Then there is the cartoon’s undertones about religion and authority, and how those two concepts interact to realize a compromise that will ensure the safety of the mythical creatures.

That compromise is fleshed out in a musical number where the yeti village elder, voiced by rapper Common, narrates the history of how the yetis arrived in their peaceful mountaintop dwelling worshipping stones that bear rules that are to be fervently followed.

The song, whose form and mood are reminiscent of one of the numbers in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, uproots the cartoon from being just another distraction for kids into a Trump-era parable where the tenets of blind faith and isolationism are weighed alongside truth and trust in the innate goodness of humanity.

Down the mountain

Smallfoot, however, takes the easy route out of the compelling issues it raises.

The film’s ending is just too amiable, too quickly. All in all, the cartoon’s a true delight. Don’t be dissuaded by its generic charms since there are surprises here that are too pleasant to ignore. – Rappler.com

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ Tirad Pass.

Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.