Updoot!! I saw it. Non-spoils review:
PROS
* the ANIMATION is STUNNING. I gotta say I am not a super huge fan of the yeti's design, but in motion it looks excellent. The way his fur is animated, the way he moves, it's really incredibly done. The colors are superb, the landscapes gorgeous, it's really a work of visual art. One scene in particular really took my breath away with how gorgeous it looked.
* great dialogue! The humor was excellent, I laughed at almost every joke, and the banter between the characters felt very natural and charming. It was a very fun script.
* Relatively realistic depictions of violin performance!!!!! like, i mean there were some shots where her vibrato or phrasing visually did not match the vibrato of the recorded violin, but she was very obviously performing the correct song and honestly that is so much more than I am used to seeing. the animators did their damn homework. I wouldn't be surprised if they based it off of a recording of the violinist performing the piece, but just a different performance than the recording used in the film.
* very cute, fun, pretty, and wholesome. a super solid piece of children's animation with some real heart put into it.
* idk if this counts as a "spoiler" but
CONS
* the plot is... well, it is nothing particularly to write home about. now of course the premise is "go on adventure to take a magic yeti back home," and there is nothing wrong with a simple straightforward premise, but there are a few times where the movie tries to have thematic coherence and pretend that the story about the human characters and the yeti story are interconnected.... but they, uh, really aren't. it's kind of just two isolated stories happening at the same time. and the yeti just kind of pulls out its magic powers when there hasn't been enough yeti magic recently, it's more of a fun deus ex machina than anything really that substantial. (there are SOME scenes with really powerful imagery that feel earned, but for the most part it feels a bit like forced symbolism.)
* out of the 3 main human characters, 2 get compelling - if somewhat predictable - development, and the third gets.. literally nothing. he's straight up just there as comic relief. which i mean is fine but also RIP being treated as a 3-dimensional character
* the yeti's design is still ugly even if it looks fantastic in motion and is gorgeously animated
* spoils but there's a thing i hate that pixar does a lot that sort of happens here. THANKFULLY the trope is employed in a way here that makes me slightly more sympathetic to this particular example, but I'm still pretty lukewarm on this as a concept:
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I would give it a 7/10. Definitely the best children's animated movie I've seen since Kubo and the Two Strings. It is a solid piece of heartfelt cinema, but I think a part of me couldn't help comparing it to how thematically cohesive and complete HTTYD felt, and unfortunately very very few things match up to that (not even its own sequels).
