Ever since Into The Spider-Verse gave modern computer generated animation a damn good shake up, there’s been a definite, coming-of-age-centric feel infused with a bunch of titles ever since. Experimenting with different art styles, humour and focusing directly on the growing pains that come with all that young-adult energy, such movies as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and Pixar’s Turning Red proved that the innovative introduction of Miles Morales wasn’t just a flash in the spider-pan. The next attempt to blend growing up with jaw dropping animation and energetic YouTube humour was Sony Pictures Animation’s own The Mitchells Vs. The Machines, but thanks to the complexities of COVID, the film ultimately missed its big screen bow and ended up premiering on Netflix instead – ironic considering the technology-will-kill-us vibe of the rise of murder machines. Could the chaotic heroics of the Mitchells keep the legacy that Spider-Verse created going?
Katie Mitchell is an extremely quirky, teenage film student who loves her family, but feels awkward in her skin due to the chaotic nature of her family. While her mother, Linda is loving and caring, and her younger brother, Aaron is dangerously obsessed with dinosaurs, the real issue is her deteriorating relationship with her father, Rick, a middle-aged technophobe who cannot understand his daughters reliance on making bizarre movies for her YouTube channel.
When she’s accepted to film school in California, Katie is overjoyed and can’t wait to put some distance between herself and her family in order to finally find people who fully understand her, but after an argument with Rick accidently leads to her laptop getting broken, the guilty patriarch figures he needs to fix their fracturing relationship before they drift too far apart. Possibly misunderstanding the brief a tad, Rick goes and cancels Katie’s plane tickets, insisting that the family – and blank-expressioned pet pug, Monchi – all go on a road trip to California instead. Obviously, to an anxious-to-flee-the-nest Katie, this constitutes to an approximation of living hell, but it seems that this is only the lead-in to a far grander problem.
Tech entrepreneur Mark Bowman has just announced a line of home robots created to replace his super-intelligent AI virtual assistant, PAL during a lavish roll out. However, PAL isn’t particularly ready to be declared obsolete quite yet and promptly gains control of said robots to carry out a swift and sudden machine uprising. Intending to gather up any and every fleshling they can find, all humans are to be loaded into rockets and blasted into the vastness of space. Soon, the only people left throughout this sudden robocalypse are – you guessed it – the Mitchells. Can this highly dysfunctional family come together and do what John Connor and Neo failed to do and switch those machines off for good?
If Pixar can make a film about shape-shifting into the form of a red panda being a metaphor for getting your first period, then I guess the floodgates are currently open (sorry) for all sorts of animated flicks to pounce on the prickly subject of being a teenager. In fact, under the watchful eyes of Phil Lord and Chris Miller (The Lego Movie) and boasting direction from Gravity Falls’ Mike Rianda, The Mitchells Vs. The Machines lays it’s very modern statement of intent bare. The main character, Katie, is hyper-awkward, possibly queer, and very dedicated at making her incredibly weird, but highly creative, YouTube content; her brother seems to be on the spectrum somewhat due to the very prevalent dinosaur obsession; and father Rick is painfully old school and defiantly anti-tech despite barely being middle-aged in 2021. And yet one of the things about the film that provides that all important heart that every modern animated film needs to provide is that it’s not actually a single person’s fault that generational drifting is managing to occur. While Maya Rudolph’s caring mother and Rianda’s loyal brother try to help, the script endeavours to make the issues of both Abbi Jacobson’s Katie and Danny McBride’s Rick make sense to the opposing generations that may be watching. While the well-meaning patriarch’s love of the out doors is presented as undoubtedly square, a lot of Katie’s YouTube content does indeed look virtually impenetrable to anyone hopelessly flummoxed by meme culture, and it helps to explain why two people who blatantly love each other can feel so painfully distant.
Of course, all this is great, but it doesn’t mean squat if the jokes don’t land. And while The Mitchells Vs. The Machines does have a bit of a shaky start due to that aforementioned embracing of Internet culture leading to parts of the film feeling dated already (the copious use of “Dragostea din tei” by O-Zone isn’t anywhere near as cute as the makers hoped), it soon picks up in the second act once the robot uprising gets underway. It’s here that some of the supporting characters, running jokes and crazed setpieces are allowed to take some of the strain and as a result, the film manages to score some genuine comedic bangers the weirder it gets. Two malfunctioning robots who try to pass as human by scribbling cude human faces onto their face plates and renaming themselves Eric and Deborahbot 5000 is a good time and Olivia Colman’s villainous, ranting AI is made all the more funnier thanks to her true form being nothing more than a smiley face on a cellphone. However, the film truly finds its groove thanks to a mid-film scene that not only sees the family assaulted by Maximum Overdrive style appliances in a mall, but also requires them to fend off an attack of death-ray spitting Furbies that deliver threatening proclamations in some arcane language.
Not everything about the film is as polished as its animation, however. For a start, it’s unclear what stance (if any) the film actually takes on technology, but if I had to guess, I think that it’s actually all for everyone being online constantly, despite the entire population nearly being murdered by AI. It’s not like Katie can cut back on her screen time, as making content for her YouTube ochannel is literally her whole personality, and as the bills have been paid by Sony, the movie kind of feels like it’s lacking a central moral message other than just “love your weird family”. However, that whole love your family thing is enough to ensure warm feelings are duly spread throughout the location of the ribcage, and even if the whole YouTube culture aspect of the film proves to be a little much, at least the bug-eyed pug dog is good for a fair few laughs.
While maybe not as miraculous as some of the other, super-hip, animated movies that’s come out over the past few years, The Mitchells Vs. The Machines manages to cross the generational gap and deliver a family film about family for families. And at no extra charge, we also get a robot invasion that rightly leads to Furbies being demonised. Creepy lil’ shits…
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