Smallfoot, Abominable, Missing Link
Warner Bros.; DreamWorks; Annapurna Pictures
What’s the deal with this new animated movie, Abominable?
It’s about a teenage girl named Yi (Chloe Bennet) who befriends a Yeti and must escort him home to his family before he can be captured by a greedy businessman. The movie is a collaboration between Chinese production company Pearl Studio and DreamWorks—the latter’s influence is especially obvious, because Abominable has some striking thematic and aesthetic similarities to How to Train Your Dragon.
Is it any good?
Reviews have mostly been positive, with critics noting that the movie is nothing extraordinary but still pleasant and nice to look at. It made a respectable $21 million at the box office its opening weekend.
To be clear, it’s not a remake of the 2006 monster movie Abominable?
No. This a family-friendly animated movie. No one’s face gets bitten off.
Are you sure this movie didn’t already come out, like, a year ago? It sounds very familiar.
You might thinking of a different movie in the “human befriends a Yeti and/or Sasquatch” genre, a surprisingly popular one for animation over the past couple of years. For instance, there’s Smallfoot, about a Yeti and a human who each discover that the other is real for the first time. It’s different from Abominable in that the Yetis can talk—Channing Tatum, Zendaya, Gina Rodriguez, and LeBron James are among the voice cast—and that the story is told from their perspective too, not just the humans’. It’s also a musical: Common raps about genocide and isolationism, while James Corden sings a parody of “Under Pressure.”
Wait, back up. What was that last thing you just said?
You know, “Under Pressure”? Mmm num ba de … dum bum ba be … doo buh dum ba beh beh …
No, not that part. About the genocide.
Oh, right. In the movie, Common voices Stonekeeper, the Yeti chief who keeps the rest of the village safe by lying to them about what’s beyond their home in the mountains. He explains that the Yetis initially retreated because humans (Smallfoots? Smallfeet?) nearly drove them to extinction. Co-director and co-writer Karey Kirkpatrick told Screenrant that the movie was influenced by what was happening in the news, specifically Brexit and the 2016 presidential election.
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