I was able to view an advanced screening of the movie Smallfoot which comes out tomorrow! It’s a movie based off a book called “Yeti Tracks” by Sergio Pablos. Off the bat I knew I’d at least love Danny DeVito’s voice acting and was very interested in hearing Channing Tatum, Common, and Zendaya sing. Fun fact: This movie was originally not going to be a musical. 6 months in, they decided to make it so. Luckily they already casted these great singers!
As soon as the movie began, it immediately broke out into song. I thought, “oh great, it’s going to be totally musical.” As soon as that thought came up, it was suppressed just as fast due to how stunning the movie looked. Turns out that each character took about 6 months to build and the animation studio used programming from The Angry Birds Movie character texture, and adjusted it to texture the fur on the Yeti’s. Some Yeti had up to 7 million hair fibers! This has to be one of the most stunning animated movies I’ve seen.
The amount of songs was tolerable to me, especially the song Common sings. It feels actually better that his character’s lengthy speech it was rapped because of how much information they were packing into his sequence. It would have been super boring if they didn’t have Common on this. Channing Tatum sung about 95% of all of his songs. He had a “voice-a-like” singer to help out where he didn’t feel strong enough. But you can’t even tell when it’s not him. Luckily we don’t hear Danny DeVito or LeBron James do much, if any, singing.
The overall message, the moral of the story, was actually very modern and I was almost shocked that it had this message. To me, it was don’t just believe what you hear and it’s good to ask questions about things before marking it as true. This really resonated with me with all the “fake news” we have been hearing about. Also I found it kind of interesting that there was not a definitive “bad guy”, just misunderstanding each other, Yeti and Humans, and fear of each other that made them act in a fearful way.
There were a few laugh out loud moments, especially with the characters Thorp (Jimmy Tarto) and Fleem (Ely Henry), but this to me is still a children’s movie. If you don’t mind that, it’s a stunning movie to see and has a great message.
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