Considering the sheer
dominance of CG animation, it’s a minor miracle that stop-motion films manage to
occasionally pop in thousands of theaters around the world. Aardman has been
going at it since the 80’s, with their latest venture being last year’s
charming little caveman/soccer comedy Early
Man, and it’s Wes Anderson’s preferred method when dipping into
animation with Fantastic Mr. Fox or Isle
of Dogs. But it’s Laika Studios that’s been keeping the tradition
alive, pushing the boundaries of the mediums to its limits with modern classics
like Coraline, ParaNorman, and Kubo
and the Two Strings. Missing Link
is more charming and subdued than any of those, but beneath its cuddly veneer
hides a sharp mind and a big heart.
Our story follows Sir Lionel Frost
(Hugh Jackman), an explorer who spent his life hunting down the world’s rarest
and most elusive creatures, but a lack of proof has made him a laughing stock among
his fellow adventurers. One day he receives a letter with clues to the
whereabouts of the legendary Sasquatch, and he sees this as his big break. But
when he makes his way to his layer, it’s revealed that not only was it the Sasquatch
himself (Zach Galifianakis) who sent that letter, but that he can read, write, speak,
and is quite literal. Turns out that the reason the Sasquatch, who calls
himself Susan, reached out to him in the first place is because he’s the last
of his kind, and believes he can help him find his cousins, the Yeti, in the hidden
city of Shangri-La. With the help of Lionel’s old partner’s widow Adelina (Zoe
Saldana) and pursued by an assassin (Timothy Olyphant) sent by the adventure
club’s leader (Stephen Fry), Lionel and Susan travel across the globe to unite
him with his new family.
Laika have done groundbreaking
work in the field of stop-motion animation, but because stop-motion is such a
painstaking, time-consuming process, most other factors have to be boiled down
to their bare essentials. On the animation front, Missing Link pulls out all the stops. Since it’s a globetrotting
adventure it’s spread across several unique exotic locations, with a reported
110 sets built, more than any other film Laika has done before. Director Chris
Butler has admitted in an
interview that one of the biggest challenges was animating Susan because of
his size, his oblong shape, and the fact that he’s covered in fur. One way they
worked around this was by making his fur into a hundred leaflike clumps, making
him look like a Christmas tree squeezed into a tweed suit. And even though Laika
wears its stop-motion bona fides on its sleeve, it does implement CG whenever
necessary, most notably during the film’s opening sequence where he nearly
sacrifices his assistant to the Loch Ness Monster.
While the scale is bigger than
it’s ever been, the story is probably the smallest Laika has ever worked with.
The dynamic between Lionel and Susan is cut from the cloth of classic odd
couple duos like Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello. Lionel is a dignified
explorer who’s passionate about discovering new things, but is self-absorbed
and inconsiderate of the wants and needs of others. Susan, on the other hand,
is gentle and sweet-natured, but takes things literally, doesn’t know his own
strength, and maybe isn’t as bright as he lets on. As different as they are,
they’re both looking for the same thing: acceptance. Lionel wants to be accepted
by a group of stuck-up, curmudgeonly, colonialist elitists who want nothing to
do with him. To me he seems like a reversal of Archibald Snatcher, the
grotesque villain from Laika’s own The
Boxtrolls, albeit one who wised up before stuffing himself with cheese to
the point of exploding. Susan, on the other hand, just wants to find the yetis
to confirm that he’s not the last of his kind, but doesn’t get the warm welcome
he was hoping for. Why exactly they reject him would be stepping into spoiler territory,
but suffice to say, they’re intrinsically tied into one another.
Bottom line, Missing Link is a
simple, charming animated romp that’s more than meets the eye. The animation is
spectacular, the characters are well written, and while it’s not as daring as
its predecessors in the writing department, more than makes up for it in scale.
If for whatever reason you have some reservations about taking your little ones
to see Shazam!,
this should be an adequate substitute.
7/10
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