It just takes one. Sony Pictures Animation has been a perennial 2nd tier animation service, settling for middling franchises like Hotel Transylvania/The Smurfs, or outright garbage like The Emoji Movie. And then 2018 hit, and Sony invested in a little project called Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse. An Oscar and critical acclaim later, Sony got a taste of the big time. And if The Mitchells vs. the Machines is any indication, we might be witnessing the arrival of the next major challenger to the Disney/Pixar juggernaut.
Katie Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson) would have been a recurring guest on Bein Quirky with Zoey Deschanel. Making home movies about her pet Doug the Pug, Katie aspires to become a real life filmmaker, and has been accepted at the film school of her dreams. Katie sees that her brother Aaron (Mike Rianda, also the director) and mom Linda (Maya Rudolph) are excited for her but sad to see her go, but Katie’s dad Rick (Danny McBride), who never understood her short films, isn’t as supportive as the rest of the Mitchells, worried about Katie failing and not having a backup plan. Desperate to try to connect with his daughter before school, Rick cancels Katie’s flight to college, taking the family one last road trip in the old station wagon. Along the way, Mark Bowman (Eric Andre), the founder of PAL labs sees his software upgrades turn his robots sentient and take over the planet/enslave humanity, leaving the Mitchells and their pocket Number 3 Robertson Head Screwdrivers left to save the day.
The biggest mistake an animated movie can make is pandering to its target audience – kids – by dumbing down its storytelling and jokes. The Mitchells vs. the Machines sees the Sony Animation team leaving that past behind, resulting in a movie that works on multiple levels like all the best animated films. Let’s start with the references. Dumb movies turn the reference itself into a punchline; smart movies take that reference and use it to elevate an already funny punchline into something legendary. Furbies were a giant thing in 1998, the kind of thing parents would get into fistfights for on black Friday. In Mitchells vs. the Machines, one of the highlight jokes of the movie involves Furbies, but the reason the joke works so well is not because an 8 year old’s knowledge of the 1998 Christmas toy craze. The writers take the weird traits of the toy and extrapolate them to a crazy extreme, making the punchline something downright hilarious on its own, but if you know what a Furby is, it makes it 5%-10% funnier, or what I call a perfect movie reference. Then there’s the way the movie handles character development for non human characters. In a lesser film, Doug the Pug would be the only highlight, standing out because of how weird he looks. But The Mitchells vs. the Machines is not a lesser film. They take what could have been generic robot bad guys, and choose to give them human adjacent personalities. My favorite characters were Eric (Beck Bennett) and Deborahbot 5000 (Fred Armisen), two damaged robots that try to talk their way out of the hijinks they get into, and failing hilariously at it. Everything Rianda and Jeff Rowe write for those 2 is beautifully strange but empathetic, making kids laugh and care about them when the big finale comes around. And that finale might be the most brilliant piece to show how smart Mitchell’s vs. the Machines is. This movie could have fallen into a giant trap of becoming an explosion based spectacle distracting from the story. Instead, the movie takes a common relatable problem like waiting for a video to load, cell phones covered in water, or strange computer errors and integrates them seamlessly into a story about saving the world, culminating in a joke involving Katie’s dad Rick that is so relatable and brilliant that I start to laugh everytime I think about it.
As reliable of a joke machine The Mitchells vs. the Machines is, the power of the movie comes from it’s story about the unlikely family at its center. The Mitchell’s are a family of artists, diving head first into whatever excites them, and usually what excites them is experienced on video, online, or through a phone. Instead of showing an outside perspective of someone looking at a device (used sparingly, but effectively), Mike Rianda and Jeff Lowe give us glimpses of how those movies/images help inspire the family. Katie’s mind is always working, turning funny images of Doug the Pug in a funny hat at home into a movie she can put onto a screen; Rick’s love language is through the video camera and nature, so he filters everything he experiences through that lens. As a result, Katie and Rick are so similar, which makes them so foreign to one another as they’re blinded by their own life filters. That tension drives the emotional beats of the story, with Linda and Aaron trying to help keep Katie/Rick from fighting with one another while also digging into their things too (Linda’s trying to one up the neighbors, Aaron’s obsessed with accurate representations of dinosaurs in media). These little rabbit holes and personality quirks are embraced by the movie, delivering the lesson about not seeing those quirks as faults, but as loveable traits once you see how they develop. And as the Mitchells start to remove the lenses that they have filtered their lives though, what they see are the people they love on the other side, having their back no matter what. This message is delivered really subtly and sweetly while the jokes are flying fast, early and often, making you laugh and cry at the same time, confusing the hell out of your kids.
Thanks to The Mitchells vs. the Machines, I know what life is like inside the head of an artist. Ideas come fast and frequently, in all fonts, shapes, sizes, media. At times it can be disorienting, and at times it can be exhilarating. And also thanks to The Mitchells vs the Machines, I learned maybe tech CEOs shouldn’t render their operating systems 100% obsolete; we risk pissing them off, leading to a chain of events resulting in human enslavement by our robot overlords. I’d start by maybe not INSISTING I update my software every 2-3 days, but that’s just a suggestion…