The Mitchells v. The Machines

I'm not a good judge of animated films.  For some reason, I find them, alienating and the enormous energy required to produce a movie of this sort sometimes seems to me to be wasted effort.  I suppose that at heart I follow Andre Bazin's theory that film is, in essence, photographic -- that is, objective and representational, each shot portraying some sort of truth that God has impressed into reality.  Animated pictures aren't photographic -- in fact, post-Pixel studios films aren't even drawn; they are manufactured from computer data points.  They stray so far from pure (or mere) representation that my imagination, I fear, can't follow them,  Therefore, I can be (faintly) impressed with a tour-de-force of animation like Sony's Imageworks The Mitchells v. the Machines, but am not really moved by the picture.  Others, I think, may disagree and, in fact, find the film both emotionally compelling and beautiful.

The narrative in The Mitchells is an uneasy mixture of zany, hyper-violent science fiction (a robot apocalypse) combined with a mawkish family drama that is like an ultra sentimental pastiche of themes that we find in Ozu films.  A teenage girl Katie Mitchell makes films on her phone, posting them to her You Tube channel.  The film that she makes feature the family dog, a weird-looking barrel-shaped beast named Monch.  (Apparently, the images she uses in her films are heavily manipulated with filters and swaths of color decoration -- but this is hard to judge because the movie in which her movies are embedded has the same qualities:  the images swarm with little emblems and patches of animate color..)  There is a very slight implication that the girl may be lesbian, although the movie is "family friendly" and, therefore, this hint is very subtle.  The girl's family consists of her mother, apparently an elementary school teacher (she rewards people with star decals) and father, a handy, gruff do-it-yourselfer who is not exactly Luddite, but clearly computer illiterate.  (The mother is voiced by Maya Rudolph and Rick, the father, speaks through Danny McBride).  Katie has a younger brother who is obsessed to a pathological degree with dinosaurs.  Katie's films impress a college in California and she is admitted to that school's filmmaking program.  On the night before Katie departs from Michigan for California, she gets into a quarrel with her father and he, inadvertently, smashes her laptop computer.  To make it up to her, Rick decides to drive Katie cross-country to California and the four family members embark with Katie sulking in the backseat of the Mitchell's orange 1993 stick-shift stationwagon.  Unbeknownst to the family, a callow super-billionaire tech mogul premieres a new kind of cell-phone, the so-called new PAL model.  The mogul's old phone is jealous of the attention bestowed upon the new model and, when she is swept aside as obsolescent junk, the scorned phone instigates a robot rebellion.  (The new model phone is a limber, wise-ass white humanoid robot.)  Robot armies descend from the skies with an aim toward exterminating mankind.  We don't see any humans killed -- this is 'family friendly' entertainment after all but what happens is fairly disturbing.  People are encased in turquoise hexagons and assembled in giant glowing beehive combs that seem to be many thousands of feet high -- the plan is to shoot the humans in their hexagon cells into outer space where they will be killed.  The robots attack the Mitchell family when they are stopped to inspect a dinosaur-themed cafe and everyone around them is imprisoned in the luminous hexagons.  After some combat between the family and the robots, two of the mechanical men are damaged and join the side of the Mitchells.  (These robots are played by Beck Bennett of SNL and Fred Armisen).  The robots reveal that there is a "kill code" that will shut off the Queen Robot, the aggrieved cell-phone's earlier PAL model.  The "kill code' can be uploaded into the router from a store at the Mall of the Globe in eastern Colorado.  After avoiding a number of traps and obstacles, the Mitchell family reaches the Mall where there is big battle with "Furbies" -- that is, furry little gremlins that are modeled on the critters in Joe Dante's iconic movie Gremlins.  (The army of bloodthirsty Furbies is joined by toasters and other appliances that have become lethal due to their computer chips.)  The mission almost succeeds but, then, power is cut off at the Mall ending the "kill code" upload in process before it is completed.  The Mitchells, then, drive to Silicon Valley where there is a final spectacular combat scene, something on the order of the fight scenes in live-action films like The Avengers and the Transformer  movies made by Michael Bay.  The "kill code" is finally uploaded and the robots all perish.  Humanity is saved.  Katie matriculates into film school and, maybe, even acquires a girlfriend -- the feud with her father is resolved into maudlin sentimentality:  the family that massacres robots together stays together.

The movie certainly looks spectacular and is filled with all sorts of exceedingly inventive mayhem.  Sequences are orchestrated in luminous colors invented by the computer that don't have any exact correlates in reality -- as in the Spiderverse movie made by the same studios, I would be challenged to put a name to the various colors that we see spinning across the screen.  The final battle scenes in Silicon Valley invoke a mishmash of earlier movies:  Katie drives a sort of rocket-powered sledge with Monch strapped to its front like the hapless hostages in the Mad Max movies.  The mother becomes a samurai avenger, hacking robots to bits with a sword, after the manner of Uma Thurman as the Bride in the Kill Bill films.  The father, who doesn't know how to use computers, has to enter the code via You-Tube -- thus, we get a reprise of any number of movies with people desperately entering data into a machine in order to save the world.  The entire premise harkens back to the robot revolt in 2001 although the more immediate precursor in Bay's Roboapocalypse.   Some of the final battle sequences take place in the cool and abstract geometric voids shown in Tron, jets of bluish and turquoise data spewing across the screen.  The style of animation involves apparently rounded, even sculptural figures with stylized limbs and big heads with outsized googly eyes.  These figures, representing the protagonists, move through flattened, non-naturalistic spaces (generally -- the closing scenes at the autumnal campus are more realistic in tone) -- embroidered with all sorts of wiggly emblems and emoticons:  little rainbows, happy faces, swaths of vibrating color.  The effect is one of the somewhat grotesque protagonist figures which seem to have three-dimensions moving about in orbs and radiating beams of flat icon-style decoration.  Most shots contain a visually complex mixture of fully rounded figures interacting with halos of subordinate emblems and symbolic graphemes.  The style is one of clashing or opposing round versus flat imagery. There is a lot of mild comedy and some sardonic satire as well -- the Mitchell's have as their nemesis the Posey family, irritatingly perfect people who are continuously posting Instagrams of their wonderful meals and yoga sessions.   The movie is overlong for my tastes, and, after the manner of big budget extravaganzas, features not one but two climaxes (the fight in the Mall and the battle in Silicon Valley). There's too much in the movie for it be wholly coherent -- Rick, the father, is represented as a sort of back-to-nature survivalist who laments a log cabin that he built with his own hands and, then, had to abandon when he had a family (at least, I think this is what is implied.)  There's a nascent romance between the semi-autistic Aaron and the Posey family's daughter.  The movie makes fun of its rather inexact draftsmanship by positing that the dog may also be read as a hog -- when the robots try to figure out whether they seeing a dog or a hog, their metal craniums literally explode.  The film's geography is bizarre.  Someone apparently thinks there are mountains in lower peninsula Michigan (the Porcupine Mountains are in the Upper Peninsula).  There's nothing but wheat in Eastern Colorado where the Mall of the Globe is supposed to be located.  You can't drive from eastern Colorado to Silicon Valley in a single night -- at least I don't think so.  But, again, I'm falling into a trap of judging the movie by canons that are inapposite to it.  The sentiment in the scenes with father and daughter doesn't judge merge on the maudlin -- it skates through that category into being both mawkish and cringe-inducing.  

The film's credits seem to last for fifteen minutes attesting to the enormous complexity of creating a picture like this.  One credit shows us that about 21 babies were born to technical crew (computer graphics specialists I assume) during the making of the film which bears a 2020 copyright.  To me, all this effort verges on the pointless, but I'm pretty sure that the film will be an international blockbuster hit.  The Netflix dubbing credits also go on interminably -- the film has been dubbed into Finnish, Danish, Greek, Vietnamese, various languages with Cyrillic-looking alphabets, as well a dozen Asian tongues that I couldn't identify from the exotic characters on the screen.