DreamWorks's Abominable

[Warm Regards]

Saw this movie last Saturday.

I think it was a bit generic but I have a hard time hating it. The title doesn't do it justice. The yeti reminded me of the flying bison from Avatar The Last Airbender. I enjoyed the violin music throughout. There's a twist with the villain that I did not see coming and honestly kind of appreciated (even if it wasn't paced well.)

I don't want to dwell on culture too much but I think this movie did a good job with the characters without becoming obsessive. The movie from time to time does address their setting (ex: they see a giant Buddha at one point, the older kid tells his mom he's going Beijing to see university, they need to cross the Yangzi River...) but most of the story goes back to the yeti.

I understand why "firsts" are so hammered in (ex: I know why Tiana from Princess and the Frog was praised as being the first black princess).

But I don't think every film about/featuring a different culture needs to be a new version of Coco. I mean, it'd be great to see a more culturally rich film about various countries (Kubo and the Two Strings for instance). But sometimes having the story happen to characters who happen to be Chinese (or black, or Mexican, etc.) can be nice too. Other people can see otherwise of course.

[Disney's Divinity]

Finally watched this. I thought this movie was average to below average. So much of it felt calculated: the buddy roadtrip formula an attempt by Dreamworks to chase Disney-PIXAR's coattails--unfortunately; the creature feeling like an attempt to replicate the dragon from HtTYD. Overall, I think the only things that worked about this film were a couple of scenes (Yi playing the violin with the yeti's powers attached being one of them) and, surprisingly, the twist villain. Both the fakeout villain and the twist villain had decent designs (although Burnish's design was very owl-like ). I'm not crazy about the twist villain formula at all, but I actually thought evil!Merida worked.

All of the protagonists were annoying, but at least Jin had a few funny scenes when he was trying to escape the villain's camp and find the other two. I actually thought Jin and Yi's relationship to one another felt way too much like Tiana and Naveen. Yeah, yeah, I know there are many female protagonists in animated films that have daddy issues, but the way it was done was a great deal like how it worked in TP&TF, with her stuck on living the dream her father had (the trip v. Tiana's father's restaurant dream), not being able to let go of the past to enjoy or live in the present. She also worked nonstop the way Tiana did in order to realize the father's dream and her love interest was a vain, materialistic, lazy womanizer like Naveen who learned to stand on his two feet during the adventure (similar to the scene where Tiana teaches him how to use a knife for their mushrooms). Of course, they were incredibly lazy and inferior variants on Tiana and Naveen at that. I didn't really have any emotional connection to Yi at all, whereas Tiana was one of my favorite Disney protagonists.

Anyway, I have very little interest to see this again. I watched The Grinch right after this. I didn't expect anything great--certainly nothing on par with the original animated short--but I thought it could at least outdo that horrible Jim Carrey movie. It did not. There was honestly nothing redeemable about that movie to me, which I'm sad to say because Angela Lansbury featured in a very tiny 3-line role. At least the Jim Carrey movie can justify its existence by having birthed the gorgeous "Where Are You, Christmas?" into the world. This was the exact opposite case of the The Addams Family movie (another attempt to revive an old IP) which was surprisingly a lot of fun.