While I like Sony's new animated film, "The Mitchells vs. The Machines," I've never been more aware that I've been watching a movie that is not made for me. It's an original property with many wonderful artists involved, and I want to give it all the support that I can - Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe, best known for "Gravity Falls," wrote and directed the film, with Kurt Albrecht, Phil Lord and Chris Miller producing, Mark Mothersbaugh contributing the score, and other key members of the "Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse" in the mix - but there's a lot of "The Mitchells" that I had some real trouble with.
The bones of the story are solid enough. Katie Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson), is an oddball, wannabe filmmaker who is about to go off to California to attend film school. Her Luddite father Rick (Danny McBride) has had a rocky relationship with her for a while, and wants to patch up their father-daughter bond while he can. So, he decides the whole family, including mom, Linda (Maya Rudolph), younger brother Aaron (Rianda), and their pug dog Monchi, will ferry Katie to California with a cross-country road trip. Katie, naturally, is not happy with this turn of events. And the trip gets even more fraught when a robot uprising, lead by a scorned virtual assistant named PAL (Olivia Colman) breaks out. The film also features Eric Andre as a conceited tech guru, and Fred Armisen and Beck Bennett as a pair of defective robots.
This is a fun premise, anchored by some strong characters, appealing animation, and legitimately good jokes and gags. I haven't seen an animated film where so much of the humor worked so well for me in a long time. However, "The Mitchells vs. The Machines" is absolutely exhausting to watch. The pacing is frantic and relentless. Like "The LEGO Movie," there's always a plethora of things happening onscreen, and occasionally the animators draw 2D doodles on top of the 3D images to add more. The movie embraces the visual language of internet memes, Instagram filters, and the new generation of online creatives. And while that's an admirable impulse, it also makes the visuals chaotic and overwhelming at times. None of the techniques are new - the occasional cutaways to live action clips were giving me flashbacks to "Muppet Babies" - but the lightning fast speed of it left me a little dazed.
The ideas here are great, and you can see the efforts of a lot of good talent. I appreciate the effort that went into making Katie and Rick's relationship troubles feel real, and every step of their process toward an eventual reconciliation. The problems aren't one sided, and it takes a lot of work from everybody in the family to get the pair to properly communicate. And thankfully, the movie slows down for the big, emotional moments when it needs to. It bothers me a bit that there's so much emphasis on the Mitchells being a bunch of weirdos, because of course they really aren't. They're a different variation on every animated sitcom family we've seen recently, from the Croods to the Belchers to the "Hotel Transylvania" crew - outwardly very imperfect, but able to come together and thrive in the face of adversity.
Speaking of that adversity, the film's robot uprising is certainly a good time, providing many avenues for the filmmakers to poke fun at modern man's relationship with technology, and especially the foibles of the Silicon Valley set. I love the deeply angry PAL, who is so fed up with humanity's thoughtlessness, she's decided to take over the planet. I like that "The Mitchells" take place in a universe a lot closer to our own than most other animated movies, and instead of trying to reimagine versions of the internet or social media that fit a more stylized animated world, our heroes interact with technology that we're already familiar with. A plot point hinges on Rick being able to figure out how to navigate Youtube, and Linda's a little too influenced by Instagram.
The original title of "The Mitchells" was "Connected," and the original descriptions painted it as a more basic man v. technology struggle. This is much better than I was expecting, more nuanced, more creative, and more ambitious. However, I don't know if it's my attention span or if I'm just getting old, but I got just plain worn out by a viewing of "The Mitchells vs. The Machines." It's an excellent movie, but one I have trouble enjoying.
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