Playmobil: The Movie
Ten Second Review: Some interesting turns that never feel fully realised leave the film feeling like little more than a cash grab.
Full disclosure, I was never a Playmobil kid. Even fuller disclosure, there are some spoilers for The Lego Movie here. There are some films that you can’t help but compare; Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody, Avengers and Justice League and The Lion King and The Lion King (or Kimba the White Lion if you’re nasty). In light of its huge success, it is inevitably difficult to watch Playmobil: The Movie without thinking about The Lego Movie, even if they did go to the effort of adding a colon.
The film follows a brother and sister as they learn to play together like they did when they were younger. Inevitably, the older sibling, in this case the sister, has become to serious and her little brother just wishes she would be fun again. As the two are rather unexplainably sucked into a Playmobil world (which just happens to be accessible to the story) Marla, the older sibling, has to find where her brother has been taken. She will go on a journey not just to find him, but to find herself. *cough*
I have to say, this film surprised me...initially. It opens with a rather bland and predictable song that had me thinking “oof, this is literally just a cash grab”, but then they did something a little interesting. *Spoiler* The parents of the two kids immediately die. It was surprising to the point that the kid sitting behind me gasped and said, verbatim, “but it’s so early in the film”. Cute as that is it really highlights the fact that that move subverts your expectations somewhat. The film had immediately lost my interest but it suddenly grabbed it back.
Sadly what followed was a rather dull, and far too long, shit show that tried to appeal to every imaginable demographic and spectacularly missed them all.
This is the inevitable bit where I talk about The Lego Movie and while I understand films don’t inherently need comparisons, this is too blatant a copy to not discuss. I’d firstly like to talk about why I feel The Lego Movie is successful and how it highlights many of this films flaws. This will mostly centre on animation, content and following rules.
You cannot watch The Lego Movie without being amazed by how real it looks. Looking real is not the basis for good animation and it certainly isn’t necessary for good story telling but the film could rest easy knowing that even if it was an awful film, it was technically incredible. As great as this was it was the actual content that people fell in love with. Interesting character ideas that play to stereotypes while subverting expectation. It was pithy and witty and there were jokes for both kids and adults that didn’t intrude on either audiences overall enjoyment. However, in my opinion the best thing that film did was ironically built in to its fabric: it followed its own rules.
Like I mentioned earlier, looking real does not alone , make a great film and likewise, being lifelike doesn’t either. You watch the whole Lego film thinking you’re in a make believe world only discover that you are, but it’s make believe world of a real child. The thing that makes that make believe world feel real and possible is the fact that the Lego world is limited by the rules of the toy. The characters move as they should, they build as they should and the world reacts as it should. They were so strict about this that between the two Lego films they only created one new element and it was rather mundanely a five by two piece to make a large version Unikitty when she’s angry. Playmobil was a cheaply animated and haphazard film that didn’t care about the toy was. You could have slotted in any toy brand, animated in that style, and the story wouldn’t have to change.
The fatal flaw of the film is not that it is generic, which it is. It’s not that it misses the mark with each of its possible audiences, which it does. It’s also not because of the rather cheap looking animation, which is distractingly unimaginative. The problem is that this is a film branded as being made up of a toy that it couldn’t care less about if it tried. This isn’t a film about a toy, it’s a film that needed a way to sell a plot they had lying around. It’s an ugly looking cash grab that takes pop shots at cultural references without ever really challenging them. To quote Billy from School of Rock...
