Abominable

Abominable, an animated adventure that is a joint product between Dreamworks and China's Pearl Animation Studio, clearly aims to join the ranks of such films as E.T. and The Iron Giant.  It shares the exact same basic structure as those two, but it lacks the emotion, humor and magic that would truly make it take flight.  It's perfectly watchable, and little kids are sure to enjoy it.  But unlike the movies it tries to imitate, it plays it completely safe and feels like it was designed by a committee.

Rather than a blobby little alien or a towering metal man, this movie focuses on a Yeti (vocal effects provided by Joseph Izzo) who has big soulful eyes, growls like a Wookie, and seems to have a bottomless appetite.  The creature even has magical properties.  When it hums, it can cause plants to thrive, or blueberries and dandelions to grow to enormous size.  As the film opens, the Yeti is being held captive by a man named Burnish (voice by Eddie Izzard), whose life ambition is to prove that Yetis exist, and his henchwoman Dr. Zara (Sarah Paulson), who seems to want what's best for the creature, but may not be what she appears.  The creature escapes from the lab-like environment where it's being contained, and ends up running wild on the streets of Shanghai.

The Yeti takes shelter on the roof of an apartment building, where a lonely teenage girl named Yi (Chloe Bennett) lives, and dreams of seeing far off places that her late father used to talk about.  She is the one to discover the beast and kicks off the adventure when she determines rather quickly that the creature originally resides on Mount Everest (She even names the Yeti "Everest".), and that she is the only one who can lead him back to its rightful home.  She's joined in the quest by two other kids who live in the same building, the young and excitable Peng (Albert Tsai), and the fashionable and cool Jin (Tenzing Norgay Trainor).  The kids constantly try to stay one step ahead of Burnish's many heavily-armed goons, and manage to go on a world-spanning adventure that should be thrilling, but feels curiously flat every step of the way.

I think a big part of the problem is that Abominable doesn't take any chances of any kind.  It's the kind of safe, inoffensive kid's entertainment that never offends, but also doesn't try to give them something that they've never seen before.  The adventure that the kids embark on is never exciting, and filled with as little peril as possible.  I'm not exactly expecting the kids to be placed in life-threatening situations, but there should be at least some hard choices or roadblocks along the way.  Here, these kids manage to voyage all the way to Mount Everest with little more than grumbling that their feet hurt sometimes.  Whenever they do run into a problem, Everest the Yeti usually has some kind of magic solution, or there is a boat nearby that the kids can hop on.  It doesn't help that the villains chasing the kids are largely depicted as incompetent, and used more for comic relief than a genuine threat.

I've mentioned that the movie draws obvious inspiration from E.T. and The Iron Giant.  The reason why those movies are still remembered today is that they came from somewhere genuine.  There was emotion to them, there was a fondness for the story that was being told, and both seemed to stem from some kind of childhood memory or fascination.  We didn't just believe in the creature who was at the center of the adventure, but we also believed in little Elliott or Hogarth who became their friends.  I never got any of that here.  This felt like a corporate product that was trying to study a previously successful formula.  Some of it they get right.  There are some beautiful images on display, and even some imaginative scenes, like when the kids ride on magical clouds.  I kept on waiting for the movie to sweep me away with its heart and emotion, but it never did.  I never felt the strong bond between Yi and Everest that I was expecting.  You feel like the little girl is helping the creature because it's right, not because of a genuine friendship that is built over the course of the film.

When you get right down to it, this feels like a project that exists solely to emulate something else.  It doesn't feel like lead director and writer Jill Culton really had much stake in the story.  She just wanted to make a cute and inoffensive little adventure about a character that could be easily merchandised.  She did just that.  Too bad she didn't strive for more.

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