For the entirety of the 20th century, Disney ruled the world of feature animation with such domination that other major studios essentially threw in the towel, but not before giving it the old college try once in a while.
At least once a year, Columbia Pictures (now Sony), 21st Century Fox (now Disney), Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, and/or Warner Brothers would take a stab at challenging the “Mouse,” only to mostly go down in flames. Their successes were few and far between.
This all changed in 2001, when the 3-year-old upstart DreamWorks delivered “Shrek.” Even though “Shrek” finished just behind the (Disney-distributed) Pixar release “Monsters, Inc.” at the box office, it won the first-ever Oscar for “Best Animated Feature.” Disney’s reign had ended.
Self-Destructing Disney
Over the past two decades, Disney, by its own hand, has lost sight of exactly why it was such an indelible, bulletproof brand, resulting in even more market loss and an increase in negative consumer perception.Produced by the brain trust that was responsible for the brilliantly off-kilter “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” and “Lego Movie” franchises (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller), “The Mitchells vs. the Machines” (“Machines”) further explores the type of not-so-subliminal messaging started by Pixar in the 1980s.
It’s a movie that’s both family friendly and socially aware. To be clear, “aware” isn’t the same thing as “woke,” a condition that seems to have permanently and irrevocably afflicted Disney’s animation division.
“Machines” is aware because it recognizes and points out with knowing humor that humanity as a whole has become far too reliant and dependent on electronic knowledge and stimuli for its own good.
Originally titled “Connected,” “Machines” gets to the set-up quickly. Family patriarch Rick (voiced by Danny McBride) has had his fill of various electronic devices intruding on “quality time” at the family dinner table.
Virtual Bliss
Rick’s wife, Linda (Maya Rudolph), daughter Katie (Abbi Jacobson), and son Aaron (Mike Rianda, also the director and co-writer) are glued to their phones and tablets, thoroughly oblivious to their surroundings in electronic, virtual-world bliss. Beyond frustrated, Rick snaps and slaps Katie’s phone out of her hands, which essentially damages all of its contents, including several rough-hewn short films.Budding filmmaker Katie is, to say the least, beyond perturbed at Rick’s actions and immediately slips into incredulous mode. Her already tenuous relationship with her father goes from DEFCON 3 to DEFCON 1 when Rick suggests that, instead of Katie flying from Michigan to California to attend film school, the family drives there in a manner not all that dissimilar to that of the Griswold family in “National Lampoon’s Vacation.”
PAL and HAL
The principal subplot is something of a parallel story to the Mitchell’s tense interaction. Dr. Mark Bowman (Eric André) is a Steve Jobs-type looking to create a better version of PAL (Olivia Colman), a first-generation form of artificial intelligence (AI).The filmmaker’s naming of this creation PAL wasn’t lost on me, as it so closely resembles that of the evil AI HAL character from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” PAL is equally as arrogant and devious as HAL, and isn’t about to take being deemed obsolete lightly.
My sole issue with “Machines” was the manner in which the two major story lines eventually cross. It’s far from a deal-killer, and has no net effect on the ultimate desired message: Humankind has produced (proudly, I should add) an intangible form of thought that doubles in “intellect” every 48 hours. There will likely come a point in the relative near future when AI will have no need for its creators. Like PAL, humanity will be tossed on the metaphoric trash heap.
The internet, computers, smartphones, and 10 zillion-plus apps were ostensibly invented to make our lives easier and bring us closer together, when in reality they’ve achieved the exact opposite result.
