Emma Thompson, right, gives a towering performance alongside Stanley Tucci in ‘The Children Act.’

‘Smallfoot’ is disastrous, while Emma Thompson soars in ‘The Children Act’

ARNOLD WAYNE JONES | Executive Editor
jones@dallasvoice.com

Of the five major U.S. studios making animated feature films — Disney/Pixar, Fox, Universal, DreamWorks and Warner Bros. — the red-headed stepchild of the lot is clearly the latter. It’s kind of amazing, actually; WB is the studio that gave us Bugs and Daffy and Pepe and Porky, as well as the Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain and amazing memories of Saturday mornings in front of the TV. But those are shorts; long-form cartooning has seemed out of their grasp. Pixar gave us Toy Story and Up and Coco; WB gave us Osmosis Jones and Scooby-Doo: The Movie.

And now, Smallfoot.

On its surface, Smallfoot could easily be compared to comic creature fantasies like Shrek or Monsters, Inc. — sort of subversive “what ifs” about legends and fairy tales. (What if an ogre in a kingdom made lots of pop culture references? What if monsters in a different dimension really do feed off the screams of children?) In Smallfoot’s case, the question is: What if yeti (aka sasquatch or bigfoot) really exist, and think humans — i.e., smallfoot — are mythical creatures?

It’s a pretty modest premise, one that gets played out in agonizingly boring and humdrum ways.

The yeti live in a happy community atop (apparently) Tibet, believing their mountaintop is actually an island floating on clouds held up on the backs of mammoths. They raise the great snail (what we would call the sun) by banging a gong every morning. They all perform mostly menial jobs and obey without question the pronouncements of the Stonekeeper (Common), their priest and absolute ruler.

Migo (Channing Tatum) lives in happy complacency, until he witnesses a plane crash with a man inside and realizes the legendary smallfoot exists — disproving the prevailing religion and increasing knowledge of the world outside. Only he’s not believed and banished from the kingdom until he admits his deception. Unwilling to do so, he decides to venture down the mountain and return with evidence.

That evidence ends up being Percy (James Corden), a TV nature show host anxious to boost his ratings with an important discovery. He and Migo carve out a rough alliance where Migo takes him to his kingdom and Percy films it all for a special on the existence of the yeti.

If it sounds blah, it’s even worse than you’re imagining.

There’s virtually nothing about Smallfoot worth recommending. The animation is barely a notch above the Rankin-Bass Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special, and the character designs are hideous: Noseless, domino-toothed, genitalia-free giants with misshapen bodies that enlarge into enormous feet far in excess of what we think of as “bigfoot.” The songs (written by director Karey Kirkpatrick and his brother Wayne, who did smashing work with the Broadway musical Something Rotten!) are listless and forgettable. The script is witless (I chuckled twice). The vocal performances banal. Worst of all, it doesn’t even make for good family entertainment; talk about cultural appropriation! The setting is China and there’s nary an Asian face, voice or name in the entire damn movie. The only thing it makes you do is believe that something abominable really is out there… in theaters.

Smallfoot is a happy film that fills you with anger; The Children Act, on the other hand, is a sad film that fills you with emotion.

Emma Thompson plays Fiona Maye, a family court judge in London tasked with deciding the fates of children, even though she and her husband of 20 years, Jack (Stanley Tucci), have none of their own. She’s supposed to be an expert on families and marriages but cannot see that her own is falling apart due to her obsession with work. Jack decides to move out for a trial separation, just as Fiona is faced with an emergency appeal: A hospital wants to perform a blood transfusion on Adam (Fionn Whitehead), a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness whose parents refuse to authorize the procedure. Fiona must decide what’s in Adam’s best interest, so she meets him, which triggers a series of events the suppressed judge struggles to handle.

The Children Act is based on a novel by Ian McEwan (he also wrote the screenplay), it exudes McEwan’s brand of emotional turbidity beneath a steely mask of social propriety. (He also wrote Atonement, The Comfort of Strangers and On Chesil Beach.) The feelings are baroque, but the setting is often prosaic.

That’s where the casting of Thompson comes in. I cannot imagine another actress of her generation or stature who could deliver quite so layered a performance. There’s an off-handedness to her persona — less patrician than, say, Helen Mirren, but also less grounded than Julie Walters that allows her to hover in between strata. She projects intelligence behind a taciturn facade. A moment near the end, where director Richard Eyre just parks the camera on her and allows her, wordlessly, to work through her complex reaction to what has befallen, could be studied in acting classes for generations.

Tucci, although given minimal screen time, is a perfect match for Thompson’s style, and Whitehead delivers a sweet and sad performance. But Thompson’s work here is the touchstone for The Children Act.