FURRY GOOD TIME
Yeti confront ‘mythical’ humans in animated ‘Smallfoot’
I’m not sure if your kids know what a yeti is. But the computer-generated animated romp “Smallfoot” is probably going to confuse them. Co-directed by Karey Kirkpatrick (“Over the Hedge”) and first-timer Jason Reisig, the film proposes the idea that the yeti (aka the Abominable Snowmen and Women of the Himalayas) and their kids, who are gigantic, furry, blueskinned and have big horns, live without being detected by humans in a small village on the top of the Himalayan world above a circle of cloud cover they create using balls of ice they feed every day into a giant furnace.
The film also begins with a short containing a song and a scene from the film you and your kids are about to see. Befuddled but open-minded, I was introduced to protagonist Migo (Channing Tatum), the big and strong son of the “gong ringer” Dorgle (Danny DeVito). Migo’s father’s job is to fire himself like an arrow at a distant gong while wearing a “helmet” of flat stone, which over time has flattened the top of his head. He does this to make sure the “flaming snail” that is the sun rises.
“Does it hurt?” Migo asks when he, the heir to the gong-ringing job, has a practice run. “Only for the first year or two,” his father responds. Like the kids in “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” the yeti in “Smallfoot” have a religion they have created for themselves. Their cosmology begins with them “falling out of the butt of the Great Yak.”
OK. Like us, they have stones upon which are written their laws. These laws are taught and in fact worn as a many-stoned cloak by the Stonekeeper (Common), and one of the laws says that there are no such folk as the Smallfoot, aka humans. Therefore, when Migo encounters a burning plane and sees the ejected pilot and his “small foot,” he tells the villagers
because, like a yeti George Washington, he cannot tell a lie, and he is promptly banished by the Stonekeeper from the village.
He is joined in his banishment by a band of yeti misfits, including Migo's love interest Meechee (Zendaya, who is about to sing that song again) and the giant, violet-colored Gwangi (LeBron James), and together they venture beneath the cloud layer and meet a bunch of humans, including a reality TV adventurer named Percy Patterson (James Corden, the go-to Brit of animators everywhere).
Percy is desperate to save his show and boost his ratings, and he thinks the yeti are his ticket to fame and fortune. Much of the humor is reminiscent of the slapstick antics of silent film icon Buster Keaton, and some of it admittedly works. The middle of “Smallfoot,” however, sags. Also in the voice cast are Gina Rodriguez, Yara Shahidi and Patricia Heaton. Kirkpatrick and Reisig borrow a lot of business from “King Kong,” and you wish they'd give it back.