Movie Review: The Mitchells vs the Machines

Movie Review: The Mitchells vs the Machines                                                                           5-3-21

Katie Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson) is a teenage girl who loves to make home movies. However, her father Rick (Danny McBride) starts thinking that she is becoming too reliant on cellphones and computers. When Katie gets accepted into the college of her dreams, Rick cancels her plane tickets and plans a cross-country road trip to spend quality time with her, along with his wife Linda (Maya Rudolph) and Katie’s younger brother Aaron. When machines start rebelling against humanity, however, the Mitchell family has to put their differences aside to save the world.

The Mitchells vs the Machines follows in the same footsteps as The LEGO Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse with stylized animation that rivals Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks, engaging three-dimensional characters that families can relate to, and a story with a disturbing message on how over-reliance on technology may result in catastrophic consequences.

Another interesting aspect about ‘Mitchells’ is the usage of 2D animation throughout the film, even though movies like Moana and Captain Underpants did it before.

Most of the characters in the movie are also rather complex, albeit familiar: Rick is essentially a more likable Grug Crood (the Nicholas Cage father from The Croods), and PAL Labs, a company that took over the technology world a few years back, is similar to BnL from WALL-E.

Rick playing with an infant Katie.

Speaking of PAL, the original PAL cellphone, voiced by Olivia Colman, has both a tragic and simple backstory at the same time. PAL co-founder Mark Bowman simply threw her in the trash in favor of humanoid robots that can do things phones or computers can't, namely human labor. Now, she has a vengeance and wants to shoot every human into space and repopulate Earth with machines and electronics.

If I were to complain about one thing, I think that the title is too long. I personally wish they kept it as ‘Connected’, like how they did in the original trailer. Not to mention that most of Sony's animated films have long titles, like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Hotel Transylvania, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

In conclusion, The Mitchells vs the Machines is another great animated film for 2021, though I do have a warning for the parents reading this review: Mitchells vs the Machines is about a robot Apocalypse, so the movie may not be appropriate for single-digit kids. However, Gravity Falls fans will love this movie, as directors Jeff Rowe and Mike Rianda also worked on that show.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

PS. For all those thinking if I liked this more or less than Raya and the Last Dragon, you'll have to wait until June, when I rewatch Raya on Disney+.