One of the best developments in recent American big-studio animation has been the realization that these films aren’t required to show off. It’s also been one of the worst developments, as the new movie Sneaks—about sneakers that talk (really)—proves.
Movies like Turning Red, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, The Lego Movie, and especially Sony’s Spider-Verse series are less enamored of photorealistic blades of grass or tufts of hair, instead choosing to embrace a variety of designs, textures, and motion styles that often have as much in common with hand-drawn or stop-motion animation as formerly cutting-edge eyesores like Shrek. Outside the U.S., the form is getting even more daring: Flow was made with open-source software and just won the Oscar for feature animation!
The downside of this less rigid approach is that, inevitably, some cartoons will try to pass off a stutter-y frame rate by itself as a sign of handmade eclecticism. Case in point: Sneaks, a movie that seems to want style points for briefly evoking stop-motion animation while shamelessly knocking off the Toy Story movies.
Specifically, Sneaks is a hybrid of the first two entries in the Toy Story series. The Andy figure is Edson (Swae Lee), a basketball-loving kid who attends a convention in Manhattan and beats the odds to win a raffled-off pair of designer, collectible sneakers. When Edson and other humans aren’t around, the shoes come to life as brother-sister pair Ty (Anthony Mackie) and Maxine (Chloe Bailey). Maxine is excited to get out into the world and be worn; Ty frets about any possible wear and tear, and would be more comfortable in the hands of The Collector (Laurence Fishburne!), the world’s most imposing and wealthy sneaker collector.
Just Ty’s luck: When his 200 raffle tickets don’t yield the expected results, The Collector steals the prized sneakers away from Edson. During his getaway, the shoes are separated; Ty winds up hanging on a power line, while Maxine makes it back to The Collector’s lair. Ty then seeks the help of the streetwise solo shoe JB (Martin Lawrence) to track her down and rescue her. (JB, no altruist, has his eyes on Ty’s ample bling.)
So, the movie is a mismatched buddy comedy, like in the first Toy Story, with a nefarious collector inspiring debate over whether it is better to be preserved or potentially worn out, like in Toy Story 2. The shoes, though, look more like the characters in Cars, an easier bar to clear that Sneaks nonetheless crashes into repeatedly. When the movie cues up its repetitive theme song a second time in the first 10 minutes, hope of recovery fades fast, and kids may get as restless as their grown-up companions. (Sample summary from a local nine-year-old: “The songs were horrible. The animation was horrible. The plot was fine.”)
Co-directors Rob Edwards and Chris Jenkins must have sensed something was off, that the mere contrast between the stop-motion-y choppiness of the shoe animation (presumably intentional) and the Shark Tale jankiness of the human animation (presumably not) wouldn’t be enough to carry a whole 87-minutes-before-closing-credits feature.
After all, Edwards co-wrote The Princess and the Frog, and Jenkins was an animator on basically every movie from Disney’s ’90s renaissance. That gives them both experience not just at a premier animation house, but firsthand knowledge of the kind of stories that were and weren’t being told by Disney during one of its most acclaimed periods. Sneaks, with an all-minority cast and a highly specific yet familiar subject, could offer a welcome correction.
But the best Sneaks can offer is that it’s more dull than truly, actively irritating; it really is like watching a bunch of shoes try to emote. And, look, sometimes animation and voiceover can do some real magic in that department, but Mackie is shockingly lifeless as Ty, often sounding like he’s reading his lines for the first time as he says them.
Edwards, the credited screenwriter, also co-wrote the recent Captain America: Brave New World; he must truly understand how to feed Mackie soul-killing dialogue like no one else. Lawrence, too, plays his part unexpectedly subdued, which in another context might be a welcome shift. Here, his laid-back voiceover lends the movie even more what-even-is-this energy as two indifferent-sounding sneakers must pretend to like each other enough to feel betrayed.
Indeed, the lumpy chase scenes, barely-there basketball scenes, and quarter-baked whimsy of Sneaks—it’s sort of funny to see a bunch of shoes at their own disco, but… to what end?—are enough to make an audience long for far less than anything so inventive as Turning Red or Puss in Boots 2. By the end, I was ready for some shiny, bombastic, CPU-hogging junk: another Madagascar, Megamind, or Trolls, anything but more reanimated Toy Story.
This movie’s most interesting-looking character is a masked mastermind called The Forger (Roddy Ricch), who nabs rare and beautifully crafted shoes, so he can produce shoddy knockoffs. He’s positioned as the true villain, even more so than The Collector. Given the state of Sneaks, though, you’d think the filmmakers would show him a little more sympathy.
The post Shocker: ‘Sneaks,’ the Animated Movie About Talking Sneakers, Is Bad appeared first on The Daily Beast.
