The big problem with the narrative of Missing Link is that it just kind of shuffles from here to there, shapelessly meandering west and east. Perhaps that sounds more or less cohesive it isn't. Also accompanying, in his fashion, is American bounty hunter Willard Stenk (Timothy Olyphant), hired by Piggot-Dunceby to kill Sir Lionel rather than create an embarrassing situation. So another trek around the planet begins, this time with the accompaniment of Sir Lionel's ex-lover, Adalina Fortnight (Zoe Saldana), looking for an adventure of her own. Link's home for comfort, and he's come to the conclusion that the only place he can live in quiet comfort is the Himalayas, where he believes he'll find his distant cousins, the yetis. has manifest destinied itself a little too close to Mr. Link (Zach Galifianakis), and he has his own adventure in mind. In the Pacific Northwest, he manages to find the cryptid, right where the letter said that's because the letter was written by this particular sasquatch, whom Sir Lionel names Mr. So he makes a bet with the priggish Lord Piggot-Dunceby (Stephen Fry) that he'll be admitted to the society once and for all if he can find a sasquatch living in the American woods, as promised by a mysterious letter he just received. Writer-director Chris Butler, graduating from the story department on Laika's earlier projects, has assembled an old-fashioned globe-trotting adventure that seems, to me at least, to boast some echoes of Around the World in Eighty Days: in the 1870s, Sir Lionel Frost (Hugh Jackman), an eccentric, desperately wants to prove to London's foremost society of explorers and hunters that his obsession with cryptozoology is founded in good, solid Victorian science.
The script for Missing Link, I'm sorry to say, is actively harmful. There's not a single Laika film where the story is the best part, but up till now, they've done a fine job of assembling scripts that at least aren't actively harmful. There's nothing in here that triggers the same "holy shit, they can do that now?" response I had a half-dozen times or more during Kubo, and maybe this isn't even at the level of Kubo otherwise, but that's a stupidly high level, and it's no sin to miss it.īut boy, is it all kind of snoozy and sedate and dull. The costumes, which are kind of always my favorite part of Laika films, are perfect little period-appropriate bits of tweed and silk, foregrounded in both the story and the visuals, and more than up to the challenge of that focus. The stop-motion animation, smoothed by computers and aided by 3-D printers making an enormous array of facial expressions, glides almost imperceptibly, and that "almost" is deliberate, the better to remind us of the labor of this handmade art. The sets are still complicated, gorgeous dioramas, in this case complicated by the huge number of them that are daytime exteriors while there's a certain proud flatness in the skylines in some shots, like we're looking at an extraordinary matte painting rather than a real outside space (and we are looking at neither: the backdrops are mostly CGI), the brightness of the world, with the presence of tangible atmosphere in some sequences - the woods feel damp and musty, the mountains feel crisp and chilly. And at least the film still demonstrates the extraordinary craftsmanship that has been Laika's calling card since the moment they first existed. Achingly pleasant, even pleasant in the absence of any other emotional response. A harmless misfire, to be sure: Missing Link is a pleasant enough sit. After four very good or outright great films in ten years - 2009's Coraline, 2012's ParaNorman, 2014's The Boxtrolls, 2016's Kubo and the Two Strings - we have in front of us a misfire. Nonetheless, with Missing Link, I must mournfully declare that Laika has had its first miss. And when that happens, nobody wants to be the person at the funeral wailing because the last time they talked with the deceased, they had a huge fight. So every time we get a new Laika picture, yes, it is a reason to celebrate and be heartened that such a scrappy, lovingly idiosyncratic production house still exists in this ever-more-homogeneous age, because it will absolutely be the case that one of these will be the last. The company only exists because multi-billionaire Phil Knight, founder and former CEO of Nike, is an indulgent father, and his son Travis wanted to run an animation studio it's been a possibility with every new feature that this might be the one where that indulgence finally runs out (not one of Laika's now-five releases has turned more than a razor-thin profit, and most of them have lost money). One wishes to never have to say anything negative about a Laika film.
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