LogFAQs > #975231522

Evillord: This was the first time I can remember hearing the word "Kinkajou" and each time it was said my brain really wanted to correct it to "Pikachu." Seeing both the Netflix and Sony idents at the start of a film is one of the most ominous feelings in the world, but Sony animation in particular does a little better with the style it has been developing ever since the success of Spiderverse. For Vivo, there is an alternate art style that's used in a couple of the musical sections, which is great because it's a break from the "we want to be Pixar but we're really not" look the movie normally has. In general, it comes alive during *some* of the songs (I went back and re-watched the opening musical number after the 15-minute credits rolled, but on the other hand that little girl character's song is not pleasing to the aural senses, to say the least), but the rest of the movie feels kind of directionless, or rather it feels like its core story was enough for a half-hour short film and some contrived episodic conflicts were needed to pad it out to a feature-length adventure.
A Cuban street performer with a rapping pet monkey voiced by The Hamilton Guy receives a letter from a famous musician who he used to work with 60 years ago, asking him to come to Miami to play with her at her farewell concert. That sounds nice, but there's no conflict in this premise to base a narrative upon. So his monkey decides he REALLY doesn't want to go and they have to stay in Cuba, which comes off as very unwarranted, I mean it's a plane ride to the States for one concert, I spent this whole section wondering what the fuck Pikachu's problem was. But then he gets over it in like five minutes ... so then the musician just kinda dies of unspecified causes in his sleep ... then the monkey meets an annoying little girl character who lives in Florida and will help him get to the concert and deliver the sheet music for the last song his mentor wrote which expresses his decades-old confession of love... but her mom wants her to go to a girl scout meeting instead ... but then they run away from home to go to the concert ... but then the girl scouts start chasing them on bikes because their leader is a Mean Girl ... but then the monkey beats up a cobra in the jungle and they become friends with the mean girls ... also there are some awkward birds to whom the monkey must teach the art of romance. It's normal for adventure stories to be built on these kinds of little episodes, so I guess my real problem is that these storylines aren't interesting and I don't like any of the side characters. All of these little arcs are so short and under-developed that there's nothing to latch onto or take away from them. Even the storyline about the annoying little girl's relationship with her mother is basically all just handled by like two minutes of forced dialog at the end where they solve all their problems. This in turn leads to all the emotional scenes falling completely flat. Oh well, I've seen worse movies, at least a couple of those singing scenes were fun. I wish the monkey vs. snake fight scene one had been longer.

Plasma: Out of all the movies on our list, this one pissed me off the most. In the first ten minutes, I thought I was being treated to Casablanca: The Animated Musical, and I couldnt wait to see how the old man and his monkey would return to his long-lost love.
Then the old man abruptly died and was replaced by the human-cancer known as Gabriella, a self-proclaimed wild girl who poisons every remaining moment of screen time. The main problem with her is that the movie isnt self-aware enough to acknowledge that shes an annoying narcissistic brat, and instead it thrusts her into the spotlight like shes charismatic or something. The story never recovers, and its brainless plot developments only drive this one farther down my rankings board.