Disney+ brings a celebrated Kate DiCamillo book to life with Flora and Ulysses, the story of a girl and her squirrel — notably, one that exhibits many qualities of a traditional superhero. The squirrel, not the girl, I mean. She’s just a normal-ish girl dealing with flaky parents on the verge of divorce, and everyone could use a heavy dose of CG-rodent-spawned whimsy to weather the storm of their troubles. This story won DiCamillo the coveted Newbury Medal for kid lit, her second after The Tale of Despereaux, which was a charming animated film, also about an inspirational rodent. (Notably, her debut novel Because of Winn-Dixie was also adapted for the big screen, in full-blown live action). Now let’s see if the yeah-sure-why-not premise of Flora and Ulysses makes a successful leap to a different medium.
FLORA AND ULYSSES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Flora (Matilda Lawler) is a cynic. Self-proclaimed, mind you. She’s 10, and her love of the fantastical world of comic book superheroes is dwindling. Her appreciation comes from her father George (Ben Schwartz), a comic artist whose creation, a superhero dubbed Incandesto, never took off despite his most dogged efforts. His failure spun him into a funk, and his marriage to Flora’s mom, Phyllis (Alyson Hannigan) suffered. We don’t see any blowouts or move-outs, just the aftermath: A disillusioned Flora. Phyllis, a romance novelist, mired in writer’s block since the split. George doesn’t live with them anymore, and works stocking sticky notes and printers for a condescending manager at the office-supply chain store. Trial separation sucks for everyone except the condescending manager, who seems to be taking advantage. Jerk.
One fateful day, Flora’s outside when her neighbor’s out-of-control robot vacuum swallows a tassel-eared squirrel. She performs CPR. He lives, but may just be reborn, because he exhibits the occasional superheroic trait — extraordinary strength, the ability to fly and possibly a tablespoonful of sentience. Flora sneaks him into the house and names him Ulysses. Meanwhile, Phyllis is flighty as Bullwinkle’s pal Rocky and clearly struggling. “Will you point the Jack-and-Rose at me? I need their strength,” she asks Flora, who turns a Titanic-themed statuette at her mother. Yep — things are a bit desperate. Stressful. Emotionally dicey. Mom doesn’t take kindly to the squirrel, a dirty rodent in her eyes, but she might change her tune if she knew Ulysses could sit at her antique typewriter and pound out poetry, usually about being hungry: “Forever and wanting is stomach,” reads the conclusion to one of his verse passages. Yep — sentience!
The house Flora and Phyllis live in is a comically overdecorated palace of whimsy, the type of place where you can find a striped, hexagonal hat box just sitting around. So Flora puts Ulysses in a striped, hexagonal hat box and goes to her dad’s place for a visit. They avoid a homicidal neighborhood cat named Mr. Claws, who upset me, because cats are always total b-holes in movies. The only good thing the internet has ever done is combat negative stereotyping of cats by portraying them as lovable idiots. The internet also allows me to indulge pro-feline tangential rants in the middle of a review of a movie about a squirrel. Point is, stop vilifying cats, and this movie is a bit all over the place, so the review reflects that.
Anyway, George is wowed by Ulysses. They take the squirrel in his striped, hexagonal hat box to a diner for lunch, and it gets out and causes quite the ruckus of comic mayhem and light destruction. Some people, we learn, are all too willing to clobber a cute, furry animal that’s much smaller than them, including a villainous waitress (Kate Micucci), who calls in Miller (Danny Pudi), the John Wick of animal control, also self-proclaimed, although he’s definitely more Blartish in his self-delusion. This is a small town, so a TV news reporter reports that a wild rabid squirrel is on the loose and must be eliminated, so now Flora, Ulysses and George are fugitives. Can this movie get any more ridiculous? Yes. Yes it can.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: A year ago, Disney+ debuted Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made, a droll and quirky family comedy about a goofy kid and his imaginary pet polar bear that’s based on a popular kid’s book. Perhaps you see some of the parallels. Timmy Failure is more droll and less quirky than Flora and Ulysses, but they’re definitely birds of a feather.
Performance Worth Watching: Lawler anchors the movie nicely with a performance that handles real-life problems with a light touch, but never teeters into precocity. Also, cheers to Hanigan, who teeters on the brink of straaannnge in her eccentric portrayal of a depressed romance writer who eats way too many cheez balls but just can’t produce any cheez on the page — the characterization is a bit of a high-wire act, and is all the more amusing for it.
Memorable Dialogue: Flora astutely calls out her mother for writing a book about a woman who falls in love with a man who’s a ghost: “OK, the ghost babies were weird,” Phyllis mutters.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: I’m quite fond of Flora and Ulysses, despite my logical self telling me it’s kind of a goofy, go-nowhere mess of plotlessness concluding with a typical chaos finale, and I’m not so convinced about the squirrel’s superheroes there, Lou. At least the squirrel doesn’t talk, and his poems are stinking hilarious, one of which he folds up and hands to someone like he’s Hailee Steinfeld playing Emily Dickinson.
I feel like I haven’t done justice to the film’s rampant grab-baggedness. So I’ll mention how it also incorporates the following: Flora’s tag-along pal, William (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), the neighbor kid visiting from England and suffering from stress-induced temporary blindness; they play together in her treehouse outside her mother’s insane tweehouse (I seriously haven’t seen a movie home so bafflingly bedecked since The Book of Henry). Animated depictions of Incandesto zooming about. Mildly rampant Marvel and Star Wars references. A nod to De Palma’s take on Mission: Impossible. A rare Janeane Garafolo sighting; she plays Phyllis’ editor. Anna Deavere Smith as a doctor friend of George’s who takes care of Ulysses. All of this seems utterly superfluous, but it also adds to the loopy world director Lena Khan makes out of DiCamillo’s words. There’s color everywhere — inside the lines, outside the lines, over here, up there. Visually, the movie is almost wholly composed of weird little details. You can’t say it’s unoriginal.
Whether it all adds up to a step-back-and-look mosaic portrait of Yoda or Einstein — well, maybe. The movie isn’t typical Disney fodder; it’s only occasionally annoying, goes light on the sentimental schmaltz, doles out silliness in vast quantities, boasts a script that’s far wittier than most family films of its ilk and plays its comedy just behind the beat. It isn’t really about a superpowered squirrel, or even (sigh) the importance of family, even though it takes a slightly different angle on that. It’s about believing in something, I guess. Or perhaps, even better, it’s about letting yourself be swept away by comic folly enough so your problems seem a little lighter. Just when Flora’s at the disillusionment tipping point, she’s reminded not to grow up too fast. I think that’s what I’ll take from it.
Our Call: STREAM IT. I doubt Flora and Ulysses will win any awards, but it’s a charmer with cross-generational appeal. It’s pretty much much ado about diddly-squat, but that seems to be the point.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.
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