Tag Archives: Matt Berry

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Metal Mama

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The Wild Robot

by Hope Madden

With wry, almost gallows humor, visual panache and an impressive voice cast, co-writer/director Chris (How to Train Your Dragon, Lilo & Stitch) Sanders’s The Wild Robot nails the aching beauty of parenthood like few other films have.

Adapted from Peter Brown’s gorgeously illustrated middle grades novel, the film drops us and ROZZUM unit 7134 on an island uninhabited by humans. This makes it tough for “Roz” (Lupita Nyong’o) to fulfill her mission of completing a task, any task. But then an undersized gosling (Kit Connor) imprints on her, allowing Sanders to have some fun with the unending complications associated with Roz’s new task: parenting.

The writing and the delicately lovely animation work together to hypnotic effect, each unveiling something more human with every scene, regardless of the fact that there’s nary a human in the movie. Sanders’s script reflects the human experience, both the timeless (the thankless heartbreak of investing your whole heart and soul into the process of successfully losing your child to their own future) and the immediate (AI, corporate greed, tech overlords).

A talented cast deepens the film’s effect. Nyong’o effortlessly treads the line between logic and longing with so graceful a character arc that you can feel Roz blossoming. Pedro Pascal joins her as Fink, the fox who hates to admit that he wants to be part of this little family unit more than anything.

Catherine O’Hara—always a treasure—delivers dry wisdom in hilarious doses. Meanwhile, Ving Rhames, Mark Hamill, Matt Berry and Bill Nighy bring endearing personalities to their furry and feathered characters, while Stephanie Hsu injects Act 3 with a little wicked humor.

The film’s delight is only deepened by its sadness, and you may find yourself bawling repeatedly during this film. I know I did.

Sanders’s career is marked with the vulnerable optimism that defines an outsider’s longing for connection. In his worlds, a parent and their sort-of child—Lilo and Stitch, Hiccup and Toothless, Roz and Brightbill—flail and flounder until they find the strength of an extended family.

It’s a story he’s apparently not done telling. But he tells it so very well.

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Vitruvian Man

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The Inventor

by Hope Madden

The Inventor, a beautifully animated lesson on the life and times of Leonardo da Vinci (voiced by Stephen Fry), offers a lot to digest, and I’m not sure who they think is eating.

Writer/co-director Jim Capobianco (directing here with Pierre-Luc Granjon) draws inspiration from his 2009 hand-drawn short, Leonardo. A delightful sketch about trying to fly, the film ran just 9 minutes and celebrated Da Vinci’s genius in the most charming way possible.

The feature looks into da Vinci’s curiosity about the existence of the human soul. This gets him into trouble with Pope Leo X (Matt Berry), so da Vinci moves from Rome to France, where he thinks he can follow his curiosity in peace.

He cannot.

Capobianco and Granjon land on a lovely mixture media. The tale is told primarily using a stop motion Claymation style that recalls the old Rankin/Bass Christmas specials of the Sixties and Seventies. (This is especially true of the pope, who’s the spitting image of Burgermeister Meisterburger.)

Scenes are often punctuated with the same hand-drawn sketch style used in Leonardo, and together the result is lovely. But that doesn’t help the storytelling as much as it should.

Even with a great cast – Daisy Ridley and Marion Cotillard co-star alongside Fry and Berry – Capobianco can’t maintain interest. He delivers so much information so superficially that it’s equally hard to keep up and care what happens.

The story takes too big a bite. Is our focus the soul? The perfect city? Weapons? Flying machines? Because each of those has its own background, implications, experiments and host of characters. Skimming over all of it gives us too much and too little at the same time.

It’s hard to determine the intended audience for The Inventor. The humor and political intrigue are a little sophisticated for children, and the history lesson is far too long and involves far too many characters to keep a child’s attention.

And though the animation is reason enough for an adult to give The Inventor a go, the simplistic storytelling and characterization will likely leave them cold.