It can be difficult to blend in with the crowd for a lot of people…and especially for a Sasquatch.
Stop-motion animation studio Laika released its fifth feature-length film, “Missing Link”, on Friday, April 12.
The film has so far received 90% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and grossed $16.2 million in the box office.
Adventurer and mythical-creature-discoverer Sir Lionel Frost meets an intelligent Sasquatch while traveling in Washington State, whom he dubs Mr. Link.
Wanting to no longer live a solitary life, Mr. Link wishes to find his long-lost relatives located in a fabled valley in the Himalayas known as Shangri-La.
All the while, Frost and Mr. Link are being hunted by an assassin named Willard Stenk, hired by Mr. Lemuel Lint.
Throughout their journey, there are plenty of perilous situations and funny moments, and a special lesson to be learned about family and ambitions.
Both Hugh Jackman as Sir Lionel Frost and Zoe Saldana as Adelina Fortnight, Frost’s former girlfriend, play their roles well.
Zach Galifianakis as Mr. Link provides a great comedic touch to a film from a studio that is usually darker in theme, such as “Coraline” and “Paranorman”.
Mr. Link’s physical comedy and overly literal mindset make for a character that’s fun to watch and listen to, and his interactions with the film’s other characters are comedy gold.
The film took quite a few turns that I wasn’t expecting, and there were plenty of expectation-subversion moments that caught me pleasantly off-guard.
The quality of the animation was stellar, as always with Laika. The frames blend together so smoothly that sometimes it’s hard to tell the film was done using stop-motion.
If you look hard enough in certain scenes, you can see the ever-so-slight changes in the textures of the character’s faces in close-up shots, and it really is amazing, especially the amount of detail that goes into every character’s design and figure.
The film is not without a few faults, though.
The main conflict seems somewhat forced in that the antagonists try far too hard to prevent the protagonist from achieving their goals.
There were also a few moments where the characters got caught up in exceedingly ridiculous predicaments, and sometimes the physical comedy was a little too-on-the-nose.
I can’t say that “Missing Link” is as memorable as “Coraline” or as impactful as “Kubo and the Two Strings,” but Laika still put together a good feature film that takes a nice turn from the studio’s Goth-like trend.
I look forward to seeing what Laika does in the future.
