Doubt I'll be reviewing much in the way of horror stuff this month. So hey, I figured I'd do this one at least. I went to see it in theaters, and... well, I'll get to the review soon enough, right? I guess I can at least say how I came across this film directed by Coralie Fargeat, known for only one other film, Revenge, released in 2017.
Never caught a trailer, never saw an ad on the Internet, never even heard the name - until I saw a review of it by a YouTuber, The Horror Guru. The poster in the thumbnail was as laconic as can be, showing a bottle marked "ACTIVATOR" containing some green liquid. That, and the most nondescript name for a movie I ended up seeing. What's The Substance? I'll give it to the movie, a name like that will intrigue. You want to know just what it's referring to. So, you could say the movie got to me through online word-of-mouth and sheer curiosity.
And now I bestow that same knowledge onto you, with hopefully not too many spoilers in case you, too, get intrigued and want to check it out, but I warn you: This is a body horror film with notes of horror comedy and satire, so it's all kinds of fucked up.
The story
Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) was an actress with enough fame to get her own star on the Walk of Fame, but now that she's hit the age of 50, she has been relegated to leading the morning aerobics show. Still skilled? For sure, but the eyes of Hollywood have changed when looking at her. Even her boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid), the anthropomorphic personification of sleaze, is looking for excuses to push her out the door and find a younger instructor.
Ooh, I’ve always wanted to visit Paris! Maybe not like that, though.
We're actually upside-down right now!
A creation of frecle released on June 27th, 2018, Youropa is about Paris tearing apart and taking to the skies. Our character, a humanoid white shape all covered in paint, finds itself in the ensuing mess, and must find its way around the floating pieces of land, while dealing with all the strange gravity-based happenings. The paint on your character is also its health bar, and you can see it fall away anytime it gets hurt, falls, or gets splashed with water.
We're gonna kick some balls. Hey, this IS set in Europe, we just have to play football. (That's how they call soccer.)
Gravity is… strange. The direction of the character's gravity is entirely tied to the floor they’re walking on. If you moved from the ground to a wall thanks to a round floor, its gravity changes accordingly. If, however, you step off a ledge, you’ll become subject to normal gravity (read: pulled downwards), no matter what your current orientation is. If you’re upside-down? Part of the game is keeping in mind how gravity affects you relative to the world. Thankfully, you can press the mouse wheel to get a full view of the mass you’re on (and in which orientation you are – to know where “below” is), and to press the alt key to see a map of the game world and where to go next.
The chunks of Paris are lovely this time of year.
When it comes to abilities, all you can do at first is walk around. You gradually unlock new skills, like grabbing items or kicking them, both needed to solve later puzzles and defeat enemies. Midway into the game, our character learns to jump. Even later, they learn to run by holding down Shift. Further down the line, they finally can stick to walls in the middle of jumps.
Did anyone catch the number of the bus that ran me over?
There are little touches that give the game some flavor; if you land after falling from too high, the character is dazed and regains consciousness by you clicking the mouse five times, shown around its head like circling birdies. You can change your character’s look while standing on spots that serve as spawn points; alternately, you can get splashed by paint from cans lying around. You can even pick up spray cans and paint statues or graffiti walls. Finally, every level contains three pink tape cassettes. It’s a bonus challenge to find them all. The Eiffel Tower area has ten of those.
Considering you die if the paint is completely washed off your body... yeah, rain's bad!
I mentioned that the character’s health bar is represented by the paint on their body, which peels off as they get hurt; so yes, you can get a Game Over in this game, but all it does is that you reappear at the latest spawn point, the same you would have reappeared at if you had just fallen off the stage. If there isn’t a greater penalty for a Game Over than there is for losing health, why bother?
The game comes with a level editor, for which you unlock new pieces with every pink cassette you find, as well as a Challenge Mode that opens when you beat the story and reach the top of the Eiffel tower, putting Paris back together in one piece as a result.
There's also the occasional gameplay change, with moments where we use cars, pogo sticks, bicycles...
Design away! (An "erase" button would have been nice.)
As far as puzzle platformers go, this is about as straightforward as it gets; its main issue is that in a genre oversaturated by gravity-based gameplay, Youropa struggles to set itself apart. It does so in the details – the inexplicable plot of having to reassemble a city and its most famous landmark, and the paint-based elements. The first hour is kinda dull, boiling down to walking around the maps as we lack every other skill, with only the pretty sights and the mind-screwy gravity to make it interesting. The camera often shifts on its own, which isn’t great; but it’s nice that we can look at a stage from afar to find new details. The bonus features and occasional changes in gameplay are pretty cool, too.
(To be honest, maybe I’m just burnt out on puzzle platformers after covering so many, but I don’t want that to reflect negatively on Youropa; it’s not the game’s fault.)
Youropa is available on Steam for 14.99$ USD. It’s also on Switch.
I already had a hunch that I wanted to see The Wild Robot when I first caught its trailer before Pixar's Inside Out 2, this summer. Maybe I was in a different headspace, as Inside Out 2 didn't get me to shed a tear - maybe I was so busy with the themes and events in the Pixar film that it took me out a bit, and rewatching it later will unlock the emotion and I'll be a bawling mess. In comparison, the trailer for Dreamworks' painted CGI film about a robot adapting to the wilderness extrated tears from me right away.
Before getting into the review proper, can I say - I love the renaissance that CGI animated movies have been having lately? I get this impression that after a movie as nuts as Sony Pictures' Into the Spider-Verse showed what could be done by having multiple clashing art styles together in one movie, other studios took notice and began to experiment so that CGI movies could stand out, look different, feel different - BE different. The Mitchells VS The Machines, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish... I'm growing fond of "painted CGI", the technique where regular CGI animation is superposed with additional 2D effects to achieve something new.
The Wild Robot is a major example of the technique, painting over its animation to give it a watercolor feel, like we're watching actual paintings about nature. It's easily one of the most gorgeous animated films I've ever seen, a bold statement to make in a world where competition in that field is so fierce. As frequently happens for Dreamworks, this movie is an adaptation of a novel of the same name, written by Peter Brown and published in 2016. It's also very ambitious; as I watched it I couldn't shake that impression in my mind that Dreamworks were aiming for their own WALL-E, a sentiment reinforced by the first trailer for the film containing only one line of dialogue. It's a very gutsy move no matter the film, but in animation, it feels even moreso.
The story
A container with a robot inside is found by otters at the top of a waterfall on an island, and its occupant is activated by accident. The machine awakens and defines itself as ROZZUM unit 7134 (voiced by Lupita Nyong'o). Its purpose is to receive orders and do what it is told to do. (Since all material refers to the robot as female, so will I.) ROZZUM's first steps in nature are... eventful, to say the least. Yeah, you'd imagine the wildlife wouldn't be too keen on a machine, no matter how advanced, exploring their territory.
Increasingly upset by the lack of directives or orders, ROZZUM sits and spends some time (days? weeks? months? ...years???) in some kind of statis, studying the environment and the animals, eventually getting to the point where she can understand all of their animal talk. From here on, she understands them all, and so do we, as we see the events from her perspective; however, she's not any more accepted or with a purpose.
After she's chased by a large bear, ROZZUM falls on a nest, accidentally killing a goose and crushing all of the eggs but one. Her systems detect life within the shell. She protects the egg from predators, including a very persistent fox (Pedro Pascal). The egg later hatches and the teeny tiny runt gosling (Kit Connor) imprints on the robot, who doesn't know how to react to the adorable bird following her around. It is by talking with other animals about her situation that ROZZUM (who eventually adopts the name Roz for the sake of simplicity) is given a purpose: To care for the hatchling.
She names him Brightbill, and is given further goals: The little thing will have to migrate when fall comes. And for that, he needs to grow, be well-fed, learn to swim and, most importantly, learn to fly fror extended periods of time. Taking on the role of mother about as well as you'd imagine a robot would, Roz must make sure her child can take on the journey; she even gets unlikely help from Fink, the aforementioned fox, himself also an outcast on the island.
Through all this, there's also the mystery of Roz's origins... where she came from, why she was found on the island... she does have some way of contacting her makers so they can pick her up, but should she? And if she does, what will they do?
The review
Wow.
I think we might have the best animated film of 2024 here.
And considering I love damn near everything, that's no small statement to make.
The story is... admittedly, very little we haven't seen before. A robot discovering emotion? A robot taking care of a very young creature? A metaphor on parenthood? We can sit here and say "it's been done" all day, but what matters isn't that it's being done again, it's how it's being done. If you're telling a story with very common elements, be as creative and original about it as possible. Director Chris Sanders is no strangers to movies about family, having directed Lilo and Stitch for Disney, and How To Train Your Dragon and The Croods for Dreamworks.
Perhaps the best aspect relating to family in The Wild Robot isn't just about Roz becoming a mother to a little gosling, but the family she builds around herself, not just with Fink the fox, but also with the other animals of the island as they learn to accept her, and she returns that trust tenfold when the situation takes a turn for the dire.
I'll never stop singing the praises of this film's visuals. But everything here knocks it out of the park. The score by composer Kris Bowers is great. The humor is on point; I swear, I was frequently laughing through my tears. And, of course, as I said, Putting aside the general themes, the script is interesting, and events happen at a logical pace. However, there IS a lot going on in the film, to the point where the 100 minutes are quite busy - perhaps a little too much so. There's a bit of a pacing issue as a result, but it's nothing that really breaks the enjoyment.
Joining the cast are Catherine O'Hara, Bill Nighy, Mark Hamill, Stephanie Hsu, Matt Berry and Ving Rhames.
I really don't know if there's anything else I could add, really; I usually ramble on for much longer, but that covers it all. Maybe I'm holding back so as to not spoil too much (though, in all fairness, the trailers do say a lot). If this film beats Disney or Pixar at the Oscars in the animation category/ies, it will be very well-deserved. This is the movie I'll be rooting for. I cannot recommend this one enough.
