Abominable (2019) Review!!!

Synopsis – A magical Yeti must return to his family with the help of a Chinese teenager.

My Take – There is no debating about the fact that when it comes down to the quality of their animated films, Dreamworks Animation has been quite hit or miss. While their Shrek and Kung Fu Panda films did manage to do wonders at the box office despite their depreciating sequels, their subsequent franchise, How to Train Your Dragon, soared to unfathomable heights in terms of storytelling, voice acting, and of course animation, with each entry besting the other.

However, what makes their latest film noteworthy isn’t the premise or ideology behind the story, but the fact that it is helmed by a female director with underrepresented characters as the leads, the studio deserves praise for considering such a swift and noteworthy move.

While it would be have also been nice to say that the film, an American-Chinese production from DreamWorks Animation and Shanghai-based Pearl Studios, sits up there with modern animated classics, it certainly does not. With a budget resting somewhere around $75 million, the film is just not quite as breathtaking as recent animated releases, but there is also nothing exactly appalling here.

In the sense, it does enough things well to make it pretty easy to recommend to families looking for an hour and a half of entertainment. While the plot is reminiscent with traces of E.T. and this year’s criminally underrated LAIKA film, Missing Link, the film manages to win its audience by never carrying any pretense about being much else.

The story follows Yi (voiced by Chloe Bennet), a teenage girl living in Shanghai with her mother (voiced by Michelle Wong) and grandmother, Nai Nai (voiced by Tsai Chin), closed off from the world in the wake of her father’s death.

She keeps fleeing the family’s apartment in the morning and keeps busy during the day pet-sitting, returning to the complex too tired to play hoops with younger neighbor Peng (voiced by Albert Tsai) and not trying to have the thriving social life of Peng’s older cousin, the good-looking, social media-obsessed Jin (voiced by Tenzing Norgay Trainor), who’s pretty pumped that every pic he takes of his new shoes get him an almost-instant 48 online likes.

While her family thinks she has also stopped playing the violin, a former passion, but, in truth, she’s sneaking up to the roof with it at night. Where, she plays and plans a cross-country trip she had planned to take with her dad.

However, her life takes a quick turn when she encounters a thought-to-be-mythical yeti hiding on the roof. Nicknaming him Everest, Yi quickly befriends the yeti, and understands that the Mount Everest advertised on a billboard is his actual home.

As she decides to help him, Yi also finds out that a wealthy and curmudgeonly collector named Burnish (voiced by Eddie Izzard) has been hunting the snow monster as a way of recapturing his ice-climbing youth, while his company’s resident zoologist, Dr. Zara (voiced by Sarah Paulson), who professes to believe that capturing the animal will help protect him, has other ideas. As Burnish’s forces close in on Everest, Yi flees with him, unintentionally roping Peng and Jin into the dangerous trek ahead, which changes all their lives.

It’s basically E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial beat for beat, but grief is the more important element. Here, Yi is clearly struggling with the death of her father, and the way she goes through some stages of it, is done in a very subtle and simple way, even the smallest of children can understand.

Director Jill Culton finds in Yi’s violin playing an expressive device for conveying the girl’s unspoken pain, and there’s a beautiful sequence of Yi playing in the solitude of her rooftop hideout, framed against the Shanghai night sky. There’s comfort to be had in executing on such a durable formula, and life lessons accompanied by Coldplay’s treacly “Fix You” aside, the film usually resembles the swift adventure it wants to be.

With director Jill Culton, who was involved with animated films including Pixar hits Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story 2, at the controls, the film is decently paced if occasionally bumpy. It goes without saying, combined with the adorable yeti and a friendship that only becomes stronger, a few tears were shed in the second half of the film.

Although the scenes establishing the trust between Everest and Yi seem rushed, we overlook it almost immediately thanks to some spectacular visual storytelling. A nighttime scene, in which our group of friends cuddle up under a by-fireflies-lit-up-tree, is one of the most wonderfully beautiful scenes I’ve seen in an animated film in a very long time.

Occasionally the animation transcends the typical. Jin’s run through the forests, the breathtaking scene where Yi plays the violin at the Giant Buddha Statue, the beautiful sequence on the flower fields, the shape-shifting dandelions, the visuals in the film will keep the audience engaged, irrespective of the age. Particularly young viewers will be delighted by the colorful rush, which attune the film to a different frequency.

As the three children and the yeti make escape after escape, each set in iconic Chinese landscapes and always enabled at the last minute by Everest’s ever-changing powers, the most fun effect of which is a giant dandelion they use to waft away on the wind, the film becomes repetitive, and the second half’s series of hollow visual spectacles foreground the film as a corporate product.

The Yeti himself, who Yi names Everest, is nice to look at and is able to carry out his basic function of propelling its characters to where they need to go. However, unlike E.T. he lacks his own trajectory and development. His magic becomes inexplicable. As the film goes on, his powers become essentially boundless, morphing to suit the situation or, quite overtly, to realize some spectacular concept art, as when Everest, Yi, Jin and Peng take a ride on some dolphin-shaped clouds.

Nevertheless, the voice work is solid, even if nobody truly stands out. Most importantly, Chloe Bennet (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), helps us root for Yi via some tender moments. Albert Tsai also offers a likeable performance, as well, providing us with some comic relief as the diminutive Peng dreams of future hoops stardom. While Tenzing Norgay Trainor, Sarah Paulson, Eddie Izzard, Michelle Wong, and Tsai Chin provide ample support. On the whole, ‘Abominable’ is a predictable yet enjoyable animated film which provides good laughs and has enough heart.