‘Abominable’ is far better than the title suggests

by Trevor Sheffield In filmmaking, there is arguably no greater challenge than trying to mentally comprehend how other audiences will respond to your movie, especially from an American perspective looking outward. In some cases, filmmakers try to appeal to other countries by filming additional scenes that help give international cuts more relevance to international audiences (see the Chinese cuts of Iron Man 3 and Transformers: Age of Extinction for example). In others, filmmakers have to outright censor prominent aspects of movies so as to not offend local sensibilities (see movies like Suicide Squad and Rocketman, either banned from screening outright or being heavily edited to avoid the former).  More and more recently, we’ve had primarily American-backed movies like Crazy Rich Asians and Alita: Battle Angel that either try to give a voice to underrepresented filmmakers. Or, they try to prove that American filmmaking can understand the voice and style of works from other countries without completely butchering either the source material or the culture it came from. Now, enter Abominable, which attempts both.

How to vaguely train your prepubescent yeti

Abominable , released Sept. 27, is the latest attempt to find the sweet spot in American filmmaking appealing to international audiences. The plot follows Yi (Chloe Bennett), a headstrong Chinese teenager whose passion for the violin is marred by her father’s passion for being dead, as she unintentionally ends up harboring a magical yeti on the run from an old, rich weirdo (Eddie Izzard) and his faux-animal lover partner (Sarah Paulson), who is literally just Doc Ock from Into the Spider-Verse , except with red hair. Desperate to help her new fugitive-turned-bestie get back to his namesake Mount Everest, Yi unintentionally gets help from ladykiller sneaker-head Jin (Tenzing Norgay Trainor) and his little cousin, the basketball-obsessed Peng (Albert Tsai), as they ultimately have to trek past various Chinese landmarks in what may be the most expensive EPCOT travelogue never made. Shenanigans and the occasional Lindsey Stirling music video ensue. I’m just going to come out and say that the story in this film is all but negligible. This is one of the rare DreamWorks co-productions (importantly with Chinese animation studio Pearl) that we get, in addition to being one of the first films they will put out as part of Universal...and it is clear from the jump that this movie is trying to fill the void the now departed How to Train Your Dragon film franchise left earlier this year. That isn’t to claim that the two films line up word for word, of course, but the similarities are undeniable between these two movies. The same could be said for Abominable and the aforementioned Spider-Verse , not to forget Kubo and the Two Strings , and an extremely brief nod towards Ratatouille in the film’s climax. Speaking of, instead of actually showing the audience certain bits of plot and exposition (for example, what happened to Yi and her dad’s relationship), Abominable has multiple scenes that simply tell you what happened, as opposed to actually expressing it visually. To put it bluntly, we’ve been here before, and sometimes they won’t clam up about the places we haven’t yet. However, that isn’t to say that this movie doesn’t have a few tricks up its sleeves. The sequences that feature Everest’s magic in full gear are nothing short of fascinating from a technical standpoint, if not wondrous outright. In turn, there are moments where Abominable gives itself room to just let a moment happen visually, and it’s often when the movie is at its best. However, there are larger problems afoot.

Playing cold

When it comes down to hard facts, the biggest problem with this movie is the fact that, in a few major ways, it almost feels like an early 2000’s foreign animated film whose American screening rights were bought out by the Weinstein Company. As a result, voices sound ill-fitting (Peng, who sounds as if in the throngs of puberty despite being roughly eight or so), the writing can feel like pure punch-up, and everything about the movie gets so thoroughly sanitized and Americanized to the point of losing what made the original film work to begin with.  However, to outright say that Abominable is on par with the likes of Doogal would be a boldfaced lie. For what grievances I have with certain performances, the rest of the cast do an excellent job with what they’re given (Bennett and Izzard easily stand out as the best of the bunch). For the issues I have with the writing, I realize that this movie has to effectively work simultaneously for English and Mandarin-speaking audiences which, given the results, they’ve not done a bad job at doing. However, if I had to encapsulate all of the movie’s issues with one moment, it’s arguably the film’s centerpiece: the Leshan Buddha scene. The sequence, in concept, is powerful. In the aftermath of a traumatic accident, Yi and company finally make their way to the world’s largest Buddha statue. In tribute to her dearly departed daddy, she gets up on one of the Buddha’s hands and starts into a violin solo as flowers start to bloom on the moss-slathered statue. No quips, no expository dialogue, no unnecessary “Cut-to-the-Monkey” shots. It’s just silence, Yi playing, and the animation telling the story...in concept. In reality, the scene is literally bookended by Coldplay’s “Fix You.” I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I think “emotional apotheosis,” the last thing I tend to think of is the musical equivalent to Sierra Mist. Sure, it’s great when you’re in the mood, but you can do so much better.

The real yeti was inside us all along

Let me be clear on one thing: Abominable is by no means a “bad” movie. As I had mentioned prior, when the film actually settles down for long enough to actually hone in on a specific emotional beat and lets the visuals speak for themselves, it shows that genuine time and effort went into making them work. However, it’s undeniable how much of this film feels at the mercy of corporate meddling to either dumb down the film for American audiences or lean harder into travelogue aspects in order to better appeal to the Chinese market...not that that’s entirely unwelcome here. In short, as a result of spreading itself too far and too thin with everything that it’s trying to be (a HTTYD successor, the next big DreamWorks franchise, a film that can just as easily appeal to American and Chinese audiences), Abominable loses sight of the most important thing that it can be: itself.

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