Scarygirl is one of those animated productions so loaded with colour and bling, so lit up like a pinball machine, that merely absorbing it makes you feel old. While watching I couldn’t help but wonder if today’s youth consume too many flashing lights and loud noises – and, by the way, keep it down, some of us have to work in the morning.
Once accustomed to the film’s retina-straining shininess, it became increasingly clear the creative elements conjured by the directors Ricard Cussó and Tania Vincent are relegated almost entirely to the surface, because under the hood it’s very familiar indeed. An archetypal hero’s journey in which a youngster heeds the call of adventure, steps out of their comfort zone and encounters various friends and foes en route to confronting a blabbering villain with an emotional backstory. The villain is Dr Maybee, voiced by Sam Neill, who verbally chews the scenery and joins a stacked cast including Tim Minchin, Deborah Mailman, Anna Torv, Dylan Alcott, Mark Coles Smith and Rob Collins.
The question going through most adults’ minds will be whether they can sit down and watch Scarygirl next to their child the way they did, perhaps, during the fabulous pathos-filled Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and both of the terrifically invigorating Spider-Verse movies. Sadly the answer is probably no – not without getting itchy feet. None of the film, which is based on the Australian illustrator Nathan Jurevicius’s graphic novel, is done terribly, but for viewers whose age exceeds their shoe size, it’s likely to be a “so what?” experience, the aesthetic jumping around like a cut snake but the scripting rote and same-old.
The protagonist is Arkie (voiced by Jillian Nguyen), an anthropomorphised goth octopus (you’ve never heard of one?!) with black hair, an eye patch, a tentacle-like arm, a large bobble head and disproportionately small body. She resembles a Tim Burton creation, Halloweenish but cute as a button. Before we visit Arkie’s idyllic peninsula community, which is beachside and mountainside, a prologue spells out the trouble about to come for her father, Blister (Rob Collins), a rare giant octopus who looks like a toy squid crossed with a broccoli shoot.
In a dive bar in the appropriately titled City of Light, a robed customer with glowing yellow eyes implores a blue mouse-like underworld figure with a thick Aussie accent to get his bounty hunters to bring her a squid. At this point I might’ve contemplated the elasticity of consciousness, the doors of perception, the sheer strangeness of it all. But there isn’t time: hurtling forwards, the location switches to the aforementioned peninsula, where Arkie visits her dad, who for reasons that escaped me has the ability to regenerate life. When a giant ominous beam reaches towards the sky, like a baddie’s big weapon in a superhero movie, we learn that “dangerous and selfish” folk who “don’t see the world like we do” are draining resources from the sun.
My thought that perhaps this will turn into a climate change analogy solidified when Blister says, “C’mon, kiddo, let’s go help some plants.” But the environmental messages are half-baked, put to the side in favour of the aforementioned conventional villain, who operates that beam-like energy zapper. This cranky chap’s backstory gets much attention in the last act, during which an unexpected connection is revealed between him and the hero because – plot twist – “this time it’s personal”.
I wouldn’t say the film’s aesthetic is original, but it certainly looks bold, if a little cutesy and computery, like cutscenes from a child-oriented video game informed by a vaguely stop-motion-esque look. It would have been wonderful for some of that boldness to have made its way into the screenplay. All the expected boxes are marked, then filled. Prologue? Tick. Smidge of worldbuilding? Tick. Emotional bonding scenes before disruption of the status quo? Tick. Crossing the threshold into dangerous scenarios? Tick. A potentially planet-destroying crisis? Tick. A moralistic resolution? Tick.
The best family movies awaken the adult in the child and the child in the adult. This one mistakes colour for creativity, pumping its surface full of vim and vigour but letting the writing wither on the vine. The screenplay could have done with some of Blister’s life-regenerating powers.
• Scarygirl is in Australian cinemas from 26 October, and in UK cinemas from 26 April.
