New movie review: Tomorrowland

Writer-director Brad Bird's Tomorrowland is a lovingly assembled plea for hope and optimism.

It has been 78 years since Walt Disney Company released its first feature-length motion picture – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. Now, nearly eight decades later, they finally did it. They made the ultimate Disney movie, and with nary a princess, witch, or evil queen in sight – just two smart girls and a grizzled inventor with a utopia to build, gosh dang it.

I have written here before about how we live in a cynical era for pessimistic people. Writer-director Brad Bird’s bouncy sci-fi fantasy Tomorrowland is not of these times, which makes it the perfect movie for our times. You must check your cynicism at the door, and if you forget to pick it back up on the way out, so much the better. Tomorrowland preaches a philosophy of optimism, of looking past what is wrong and asking: What can we do about it?

Britt Robertson plays Casey, a bright, inventive teenager with a mind for science and passion for discovery. She is told numerous times throughout the film that she is special, and as such, she is tasked with saving the world. If this brief plot description sounds familiar, that is because it would not be out of place attached to many recent young adult action-adventure adaptations. The difference is that Casey is not part of some Hunger Games- or Divergent-style dystopia. She is part of our world, and she must figure out a way to make the utopian world of Tomorrowland a reality before it slips from our grasp.

She is recruited by Athena (Raffey Cassidy, a relative newcomer who is also immensely talented), another younger girl with a few secrets and a knack for getting straight to the point. They are joined by an inventor named Frank (George Clooney), who has seen the best of the future and the worst of the now and can no longer imagine how the present can make it to Tomorrowland.

Hugh Laurie plays a shadowy, somewhat malevolent figure working at cross-purposes to our heroes, but I would hesitate to call him the villain. In fact, I would hazard to say there is no villain in Tomorrowland. The only enemy is negativity. After an animated prologue introducing us to the idea of Tomorrowland, the film begins with Frank addressing the audience directly, laying out a near-certain doomsday scenario for our world. However, Casey keeps interrupting him. Rather than dwell on the ramifications of failure, she wants to focus on the rewards of success.

Bird and co-writer Damon Lindelof (Lost) set up this dichotomy everywhere in the film: Sink into despair and perish or rise up in hope and flourish. It is heady stuff for what could amount to a pre-teen adventure flick, but in reality, kids are the best audience for the message. Frank is representative of potential adults in the audience – world weary, beaten down, and devoid of optimism. The film argues he is capable of change, and maybe we all are, but kids do not need to change. The hope for a better tomorrow rests in the boundless imagination of children. They do not know what is impossible, only what they want to make possible.

On a filmmaking level, Bird is the perfect person to break down the barriers between what is possible and impossible. As someone who got his start in animation – an Oscar winner for The Incredibles and Ratatouille and a director and consultant for years on The Simpsons – Bird’s style embodies inventiveness and is bound only by what he and his team can imagine.

Comparisons are there to be made to The Incredibles, and as also evidenced by his Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, the man knows how to stage an action sequence – a fight and chase set on the many levels of a technologically advanced house is a particular highlight – but the work Tomorrowland most resembles might be Bird’s first feature, The Iron Giant.

If you have not seen it, do yourself a favor and seek it out. Most of what Bird finds success with here is on display in that earlier picture, which is as much an homage to E.T. as it is a riff on 1950s B-movie science-fiction stories. With jet packs, tramways, and funny-looking futuristic clothing, in many ways, Tomorrowland might be the world’s greatest B-movie. Nothing should be taken too seriously – and at one point, Frank even asks the ever-more inquisitive Casey, “Can’t you just be amazed and move on?” – but as a smart, entertaining family movie with its head and heart in the right place, it occupies rare air.

For all the film’s talk about global warming, famine, and war proliferation, not to mention it stars famed Hollywood liberal George Clooney, I can already imagine the conservative talking head backlash awaiting the film. Do not listen. That is cynicism poking its nose where it does not belong. The film is not meant to indoctrinate, as some will no doubt claim, but to inspire. It speaks to the hope inside all of us for a brighter future, but the responsibility is ours to listen.

I said up top Bird and his collaborators have made the ultimate Disney movie, which I mean as way of discussing its place in the company canon but mostly as a reflection of Disney himself. For whatever else he was, he was a firm believer in the power of imagination to make dreams come true and change the world. Tomorrowland makes those dreams tangible and gives us a blueprint for change. It is up to us to choose to follow it.

See it? Yes.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Animated Short

Best Animated Short nominee The Dam Keeper was directed by Robert Kondo and Daisuke Tsutsumi.

Each day as we make our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

Best Animated Short

The nominees are:

The Bigger Picture

The Dam Keeper

Feast

Me and My Moulton

A Single Life

Among the cooler, little-discussed trends in the last decade or so has been the resurgence of the animated short to accompany feature films. Major studios such as Dreamworks and Disney-Pixar have used their celebrated animated films to release equally impressive shorts, while the rise of digital animation has allowed smaller production houses to jump in the game with their own shorts.

John Lasseter, who oversees all of Pixar’s productions won his first Academy Award for Tin Toy, an animated short that was loosely adapted and expanded into Toy Story, which you may recognize as the film that launched the Pixar empire. Walt Disney, who won 22 Oscars, won 12 for Animated Short, including seven consecutive awards from 1934 to 1940.

Walt Disney Studios is in the mix once again this year, as it is almost every year, but a big studio is no guarantee of an Oscar anymore with talent from around the globe producing stunning work in a wide variety of animation styles. The nominees this year come from the U.S., the U.K., Norway, and the Netherlands. They range from just two minutes long to 18, but they all have something vital to say about the world we live in and how our interactions with people can have long-lasting effects.

The Dam Keeper (directed by Robert Kondo and Daisuke Tsutsumi) – I am not certain how anyone could see this film and not name it the best animated short of the year. With no qualifier, this is one of my favorite films of 2014. In just 18 minutes, The Dam Keeper manages to tackle tough subjects such as loneliness, isolation, bullying, the environment, and forgiveness while still telling a touching story about friendship and featuring the most beautiful animation of this group.

In a world populated by anthropomorphic animals, a small pig operates a giant windmill that keeps a poisonous cloud of pollution from overrunning his village. Every morning, he wakes up and gets the windmill spinning to protect the town, then he heads to school, where he is physically and emotionally bullied by his classmates for not being as attractive or smart or popular as they. Despite the abuse from his peers and the indifference of his teachers and other adults, the pig performs his duties to preserve the lives of an ungrateful populace.

It is heady stuff for a cartoon, but it shows just how powerful these shorts can be, stoking feelings of rage, despair, and pain, all for the plight of this little human-like pig. Anyone who has ever been bullied like this knows what it is to feel like nothing you can do will ever make it stop, like the pain will never go away. It is a sad truth that many children live with every day, but most suffer in silence because they are convinced they deserve this, so they walk around invisible to everyone until they truly are gone. The Dam Keeper understands this, and that alone is worth celebrating.

Feast (directed by Patrick Osborne) – As the Walt Disney Studios entry this year, Feast was released to theaters to play before Animated Feature nominee Big Hero 6. It tells the story of one man’s life as seen through the eyes of his faithful, hungry dog. The animation is gorgeous, as one would expect from a Disney production, and the story is straightforward and touching.

Rescued from an alley by the man who becomes his owner, the dog sees the world through the lens of the table scraps and canned food he receives. As the man’s life changes, so does the dog’s food, for better and for worse. What is remarkable about this film is how effortlessly Osborne, working from a story by Nicole Mitchell and Raymond Persi, is able to tell a deeply affecting tale about depression in the background of one adorable dog’s never-ending feast.

A Single Life (directed by Marieke Blaauw, Joris Oprins, and Job Roggeveen) – A brilliant little story that goes by in a flash, I only wish it were longer, but its brevity is the point. A woman receives a mysterious vinyl record. When she plays it, she finds that if she speeds up the record, she can fast forward through her life. If she plays it backward, she goes back in time.

It does not have the fanciest animation of the bunch, but it is clever, entertaining, and surprisingly poignant. In just two minutes of run time, Blaauw, Oprins, and Roggeveen lay out the case for stopping to appreciate the music rather than trying to skip ahead to the good parts because no matter how long it plays, the record will come to an end.

The Bigger Picture (directed by Daisy Jacobs) – Two bickering adult brothers argue over who will care for their dying mother. Though it is clear they were never close, the longer their mother clings to life, the wider the gap between the brothers grows. It is an honest, low-key examination of how strained family relationships can be altered by the death of a loved one, and its story will be familiar to anyone who has experienced a similar situation.

The immediately striking animation is among the most unique and innovative I have seen in recent years, as Jacobs uses six-foot-tall painted characters in life-size sets to tell her story. By filming on live sets, Jacobs imparts a tactile feel to the film that makes the world seem lived in and imperfect, while at the same time giving depth to the frame that is lacking in most non-computer-generated animation. The style is at first startling in its oddness, but ultimately, it is key to creating the reality of the story.

Me and My Moulton (directed by Torill Kove) – Me and My Moulton is about a girl who comes from “the weird family.” You know the one. They don’t dress like everyone else, eat like everyone else, or live like everyone else. For all intents and purposes, they are regular folks. They just seem odd to the outside world, and when you are a child coming of age, there is nothing worse than seeming odd to the outside world. They live above a “normal” family, and all day, the girl wishes her family were more like the downstairs neighbors.

The animation will remind some of children’s cartoons such as those you might find on PBS, and the story of learning to love who you are and where you come from certainly takes its cues from that style of cartoon as well. Kove is the only director in this group who is a previous nominee. She has three nominations in total, and she won this award for her 2006 animated short The Danish Poet, which employed a similar hand-drawn style. The Academy clearly likes her work, but Me and My Moulton is probably at the back of the line this year.

The final analysis

If anything other than The Dam Keeper or Feast wins this award, it will go down as one of the most shocking upsets of the night. The Dam Keeper is the most deserving on both a story and an animation level. Despite wins for big studios in the past, the Academy is rarely swayed by the big names behind a production in this category, usually awarding the best work – a novel concept, I know – but Feast would not be an unworthy winner.

The Bigger Picture won the British Academy of Film and Television award for short animation, but like Boogaloo and Graham in the live action short category, it did not compete there against any of the other Academy Award nominees. The innovation of The Bigger Picture may be enough to sway voters, and the film certainly has an emotional core, but this one probably comes down to the two American films in the lineup, The Dam Keeper and Feast.

Will win: The Dam Keeper

Should win: The Dam Keeper