REVIEW: “The Mitchells vs. The Machines”

REVIEW: “The Mitchells vs. The Machines”

May 10th, 2021

Martin Goodman

Hot dog, especially if it’s a pug! Sony Animation’s The Mitchells vs. The Machines is finally out by way of Netflix, and it’s one of the best animated family films to hit the screens in quite some time. The producing team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) are proving to be instinctual geniuses when it comes to putting out animated epics. The tale of the last humans able to resist an army of killer robots and their AI leader could have been played a lot of ways but making those humans members of an off-kilter, perpetually squabbling family who must learn to see the best in each other or perish gives the film it’s soul.

MVM was co-written and co-directed by Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe, formerly the team behind the animated Disney series Gravity Falls. While there are some stylistic similarities between the productions, MVM takes some of the premises to much wilder heights and represents a clear step forward for Rianda and Rowe. The basic plot is fueled by the Internet and social media as we knew it back in the early 2000s. Young Katie Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson) sees her talent in making cheesy YouTube videos result in acceptance to a film school in California.

Her somewhat stuffy dad Rick (Danny McBride) is not too keen on her future vocation and a major argument ensues. Katie’s mother Linda (Maya Rudolph) tries in vain to negotiate both sides, and dinosaur-obsessed younger brother Aaron (Mike Rianda) just seems to be along for the bumpy ride. Also in the mix is the family dog, a goofy pug named Monchi (actually voiced by a real dog). Rick decides to make things up to Katie by taking the whole family on a cross-country drive to Katie’s California film school.

But, yikes, at the same time, AI wunderkind and mogul Dr. Mark Bowman (read Bill Gates) is replacing his longtime AI assistant and companion PAL (a sentient smartphone voiced by Olivia Coleman) with a new generation of service robots. In revenge, the jilted PAL commandeers the robots and sends them on a mission to collect all living humans and shoot them into space, never to return (the hilarious “ad” for PAL “airlines” is a riot). The Mitchells miraculously escape and it’s up to them to take the fight to PAL, free humanity, and in the process, become a loving family.

How this is ultimately accomplished I won’t reveal here, but even the pug (and two defective yet rebellious robots) play their part. Once PAL controls the robot forces, the film goes down two paths: A story about a family coming together and the redemption of past mistakes, and a fast-paced, tear-em-up action-adventure film. I preferred the latter, even with its occasional implausibility. The reconciliation scenes, especially as the film went on, became increasingly mawkish and overly sentimental, but they are intercut so deftly with the action scenes that no real damage is done. Watching the Mitchells improvise and even fake their way through PAL’s formidable defenses is a joy, and for once I did not catch one significant continuity error in the film.

The animation is a triumph by all accounts, although I did have some minor quibbles with the character designs, especially concerning the glassy, lifeless eyes. One neat touch echoing the Spider-Verse movie was having the character’s thoughts and emotions appear on screen as frenetic memes, and several times Katie’s sketchbook comes to life and illustrates situations and strategies. PAL’s more advanced killer elite robots form and rearrange themselves in shifting fractals, and in truth, MVM more resembles a comic book than even Spider-Verse did.

From kids to tweens to adults, there is no audience that won’t enjoy this endearing movie. If nothing else, it will send the present generation of internet-savvy kids scurrying to Wikipedia to find out what a Furby was.