I should have put 2 and 2 together. All the powerhouse family movie production companies like Disney and DreamWorks only make movies with humans anymore if they were previously animated. We need a studio stuck in the past, yearning for a world that doesn’t exist anymore to make a new live action family film. Sketch couldn’t be more perfect for Angel Studios, the faith based movie company that caters to people born before 1990 and their kids, exclusively. Fortunately, they are only the distributors, meaning real money, and actors went into making this thing a real gem Disney doesn’t have the courage to make anymore. That’s right Mickey, prove me wrong!
Like all kid’s movies, it’s been tough times for the poor Wyatt family. Youngest Amber (Bianca Belle) is struggling with the loss of her mother (maybe this is a Disney movie?), communicating her feelings through notebook sketches. Older brother Jack (Kue Lawrence) is quietly suffering but putting on a brave face, because dad Taylor (Tony Hale) decided it was best if the family just “forgot” mom in hopes that would help everyone move on faster. That includes selling their house, though the disgruntled agent Liz (D’Arcy Carden) is getting mixed messages from Taylor. Jack is being weird too, after realizing his cell phone got fixed after it fell into a giant pool of water near the family house. Amber follows him one night, inadvertently letting her notebook fall into the pond, which, for some reason, erased all the drawings with precision. Hmm….
What an ambitious first feature from writer/director Seth Worley! Yes the whole family can watch Sketch, but I think it’s one of the better examples of gateway horror in a long time. To make a great gateway horror movie, tone is the hardest thing to master. You have to walk the line and be scary enough to entice kids, but not too much to put them off forever. You can tell Worley is going for a Goonies like fantasy, with a little Jurassic flair thrown in. He juggles 3 different tones pretty well: his base is the story about the grieving Wyatt family, necessary for the third act to deliver what Worley wants emotionally. Then he layers in the scary, which comes in different forms, but never is too far away from a comedic element, usually revolving around Amber and Jack’s idiotic classmate Bowman (Kalon Cox), or the seasoned comedic vets Tony Hale and D’Arcy Carden, who deliver jokes while never sacrificing the emotional underpinning of the movie. It is a first feature, so Seth drops the ball occasionally; but it’s never very often, and the dialogue is fast and just clever enough to hopefully keep kids engaged before the next scare arrives.
There’s no better example of smart gateway horror balancing than those Sketch drawing transformations. I don’t know how much money Sketch cost, but Worley made sure it was spent where it mattered most. The CGI recreations of those drawings are magnificent: the right mixture of scary but kid friendly. Little red spiders with giant eyeballs that steal your possessions? No notes. A sleepy monster that gets angry, and VERY big when it wakes up? Like the kid version of a dinosaur movie. And the big bad is just the right amount of scary for even me, a grown adult man, to shiver a bit at what I was watching. But all of these creatures are dispatched as creatively as they show up, with the kids using their creative thinking, funny banter, and heroism to make every audience member want to root for them. Each creature or counterattckig weapon looks like a drawing came to life from the warped mind of a grieving child, unrealistic enough to make sure kids will know this isn’t real…well, at least something they have never seen in their world before. But, they’ll also be excited for that same reason, leaning a little closer hoping Amber and Jack can save the day and become happier kids.
Even though Angel Studios is distributing Sketch, this is only barely faith based. This is just a movie relic of a simpler time, hoping to entertain parents and their kids on a Friday night, and inspire a new generation of children to think about their Sketch. Hopefully this starts a trend, and becomes a sensation, blowing away live action Shrek or Finding Dory with a blue Ellen Degeneres, or whatever garbage Disney/DreamWorks are lazily cooking up.