The best family film of the decade.
Genre: Family/Fantasy
Premise: A town is thrown into chaos after a young girl, grieving the loss of her mother, has her sketchbook full of monsters come to life.
About: Writer-director Seth Worley made a bunch of short films, one of which was the short version of this movie, which allowed him to get the money to fund the feature version that I’m reviewing today.
Writer: Seth Worley
Details: 93 minutes
This was actually a really funny moviegoing experience.
I took a friend to this and told them ahead of time that I had absolutely no idea what the movie was about. Which was the whole point. I follow the industry so closely that, even for films where I haven’t already read the script, I usually know a ton about the film.
With this, all I knew was that Tony Hale was in it, who I love, what the poster looked like, which I also loved, and that it had a high Rotten Tomatoes score.
Well, I started worrying almost immediately once the trailers started. There was a really cheesy trailer about a real-life kid who was burned on 100% of his body who became a successful public speaker or something. That was followed by the Zootopia trailer. Which was followed by some real-life faith-based adoption story.
I then began to look around and see that all of the audience surrounding us was… families with young children. I thought, “Uh-oh.”
The person I went with looked at me as if to say, “What have you gotten me into?” I quickly pulled up my phone to see when the next Weapons showing started, and was frustrated to learn it was a good hour and a half away. It looked like we were stuck here.
The beginning of the movie didn’t inspire a ton of confidence. There was a cheap quality to the direction, with most shots looking like they belonged in a sitcom. And you could feel the lack of money on the screen immediately.
I settled in for a long boring experience.
10 year old Amber, who’s always loved drawing, has been drawing much darker material as of late, ever since her mom died. She’s got an entire notebook of evil doodles doing evil things. It’s enough for the school to call her dad, Taylor, in, and let him know that they’re concerned. All of these drawings, of course, are a reaction to Amber’s grief.
Back at home, Taylor and Amber’s 12 year-old brother, Jack, are having an easier time getting over mom’s death. They just block it out and charge on. Taylor even takes down all the pictures in the house of his wife. Out of sight, out of mind!
One day, after visiting the strange little pond in the nearby forest that their mom always used to frequent, Jack drops his broken phone in it. When he fishes it out later, he realizes that it’s magically fixed. Long story short, he later drops Amber’s sketch book in the pond, and, uhhhhh, well, let’s just say he has a baaaaaaaad feeling about this.
The next day while on the school bus, Jack and Amber, along with the most annoying kid in the world, Bowman, notice a truck in the middle of the road that’s covered in… BLUE POWDER?? Emerging from the nearby field is a giant blue sketch monster that immediately begins chasing the school bus. Uh-oh.
The bus crashes and the three kids must try and make it back to their home while being attacked by a myriad of monsters that, just hours ago, were little sketches in a book. They’ll have to get creative to survive. They’ll also need to find closure in their own ways if they’re going to truly defeat this improbable nightmare come to life.
Okay, back to my viewing experience.
I’m not going to lie. The miserly production value on this movie had me squirming in my seat for the first 20 minutes. Also, the movie was clearly geared towards children so a lot of the humor was simple and juvenile (lots of “I gotta go to the bathroom jokes”). Getting through those early scenes felt like a chore.
But then something funny happened. Tony Hale (who played “Forky” in Toy Story 4) was great. He’d have these funny little lines here and there but he’d never go overboard, like he usually does. He was playing a much more mature character – a character who was grieving – and pulling it off perfectly.
And then there was the actor who played Jack, the son. He was REALLY GOOD. Every time he spoke, I believed in his character more and more.
But what really changed the game was the sketches come to life. I was expecting terrible special effects because of the low budget. But the special effects were better than the last three Marvel movies combined! They were all perfectly imagined. Granted, the production was helped by the fact that they were based on drawings rather than real things. But boy did they look great. They say it’s impossible to get suspension of disbelief back once it’s gone. But this movie did it. I was transported into this world the second those monsters showed up.
And here’s the funny thing. Because the monsters brought me back, it allowed me to realize that this movie was about so much more than doodles gone dastardly. It was about grieving. Not just in a cursory way either. They went all in on the storyline. And holy Moses did it resonate. They NAILED the tone perfectly.
(Spoilers) There’s this great moment late in the film where Taylor and Jack have this realization together. This whole time, they’ve been convinced that Amber was the problem because of these disturbing images she’s been drawing. But then they realize that she was the only one who was doing this right. She was actually dealing with their mom’s death while Taylor and Jack were ignoring it. Which allowed them to finally face it. And dare I say that it was one of the most emotionally satisfying endings I’ve seen in years.
Without getting into too much detail, there’s a great scene late in the film where Jack has brought his mom’s ashes out to the pond and Taylor has to stop him. The acting in this moment – as well as the moment itself – were absolutely superb.
The funny thing is, the pitch-perfect ending allowed me to re-see the earlier portions of the movie with fresh eyes. A lot of that stuff that I didn’t like, I all of a sudden liked. Cause we needed to experience all of that to get here, sort of like how you can’t enjoy winning match point without going through that second set tie-breaker meltdown (random tennis reference alert, sorry). I think I was just so convinced I was about to get burned by a terrible moviegoing experience that I wasn’t giving the movie a proper chance.
I want to stress that last part because I do think there needs to be an expectation going into this movie for it to work for non-family raising adults. Which is cheating, I get it. But it’s a unique situation, this movie. It’s an “Angel” production so it carries some baggage with it. Go into it understanding that you’re not being guided by a young Spielberg here. There’s none of that gloss. It’s clunky at times. It’s generic at times. But trust that the movie is going to mature as it goes on and you’ll find yourself having one of the best cinematic experiences of the year.
Loved this!
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’m not sure how to condense this down into a singular lesson but I want to highlight it nonetheless because I rarely see it. I loved that the screenwriter framed Amber as the character who needed to change. She had done this “bad” thing by creating these sketches. So we think this is about her needing to learn something. But then the writer throws a last second reversal at us. Amber is the only one who *doesn’t* need to change. It’s the dad and the brother who need to arc their characters by grieving properly. They’re the ones who have been going about this the wrong way. I thought that was really smart. I can’t remember the last time I saw a writer use a twist to explore a character arc. Awesome stuff.
What I learned 2: In another great example of “write what you know,” here’s how Seth Worley came up with the idea for Sketch, courtesy of his interview on NPR: “Well, technically, it’s something that – an experience my sister had as a kid, when we were both kids. My sister got in trouble for drawing a picture of her teacher getting pelted with arrows. And there was just enough blood in the picture to concern all the adults involved. And she had to see a counselor, and the counselor said, did you really want to see this happen to your teacher? And my sister said, when I drew it, I did. And I don’t anymore. And the counselor said, well, then I think you did the right thing. I think drawing this was a much healthier choice than actually doing it. And I remember hearing that and thinking, what an incredibly cool thing to say to a kid. Like, this thing that you did that made all the adults in your life sweaty and nervous is actually evidence that you’re a good person making healthy choices with your emotions and processing your emotions in a healthy way. And I just decided that’s the kind of adult I want to be in some kid’s life when I grow up. And then I grew up, and my daughter, who was in kindergarten at the time, one day just started bringing home drawings that were just inventively violent. Like, unprecedented amount of parent death and blood and monsters. And I’m looking at this, and I’m thinking, oh, you can believe two things at once. You can believe that art is the safest place for violence while also believing that your daughter’s a serial killer and it’s your fault. And that tension felt immediately writable to me.
