Abominable – Review

Abominable

Directed by: Jill Culton

Runtime: 97 cryptozoological minutes

I’d never heard of Pearl Studio prior to my screening of DreamWorks Animation’s Abominable, but I vowed to keep an eye out for their future stuff. A bit of research tells me that they were formerly known as “Oriental DreamWorks”. The new name is an improvement, and Abominable will hopefully find the success it deserves in front of Chinese audiences. Writer and director, Jill Culton, has outdone her work on Open Season (2006). She has previously worked as a story artist on early Pixar films like Toy Story (1995), A Bug’s Life (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999), as well as DreamWorks features like Shrek (2001). This truly announces her arrival as a principle agent in the behemoth arena of beloved animated features.

Abominable tells the story of a lost yeti that escapes a top secret research facility in Shanghai, and a girl who tries to help it get home. That basically summarises the plot. It’s not what the story is, but how it is told that makes this one of my favourite films in quite a while.

Yi (Chloe Bennet) is such an endearing protagonist. Her father has passed away, and she has issues at home. Her mother (Michelle Wong) seems lovely, but sometimes those teenage years aren’t. Yi’s grandmother seems to mean well, but leads from a position of authority that overbears, and is nowhere near exclusive to Chinese culture. Yi doesn’t really know why she’s so uncomfortable at home and keeps herself too busy for family, and I admire the film for understanding that is enough.

She’s not alone trying to get the yeti home. Peng (Albert Tsai) is a short younger boy who is obsessed with basketball. He wants to play Yi, who asks why he doesn’t want to play with some of the younger kids from the neighbourhood. Peng confesses that some of them are “freakishly good”. This isn’t just a funny line, but tells you something about how nice Yi is. Jin (Tenzing Norgay Trainor) is the local heartthrob being groomed for a medical career. Yi seems to look up to him, and he feels a need to protect her, regardless of his superficial social status. One of my favourite moments in the film comes when he orders her not to jump onto an embarking barge to help the scatterbrained yeti. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to let you know that Yi jumps.

There are surprises in the film. The film builds lore as it progresses. I won’t reveal what yetis can do. Some surprises make sense, but may be done for the sake of it. There are character revelations that may not be necessary, but certainly aren’t boring. There are comedic refrains that keep things light and moving along. There is genuine sentiment and all the heroes grow. Eddie Izzard and Sarah Paulson each do admirable jobs as the British antagonists. Everything fits together so masterfully, as read from the animated film filmmaker’s guidebook.

Something I appreciated was the observed nuance of humanity in Abominable. There are scenes where things are said with a character’s face, whether it reveals disappointment, relief, admiration, or regret. Animated features have achieved this before, and have been working towards this for a long time. This might be something that I might “get used to” and stop enjoying so much, but for now, I enjoy emotion being milked by the intricate details of animated features, that are as poetic as they are technical.

I wasn’t particularly excited about Abominable walking in, but walking out I felt like I had seen something that I would gladly share with children. It sits on a wisdom that I am glad proliferates even our light entertainment in 2019. A character is grateful to the children at the end of Abominable, and although the line of dialogue isn’t this verbatim, the subtext is “It took me a lifetime to learn what you already know as children”. There’s a sense that they’ve wasted their life. It’s touching. You shouldn’t waste your time. Seeing this film is not a waste of time.