Dir. Kris Pearn, Cory Evans and Rob Lodermeier. 90 minutes.
4/5
The magenta-haired Willoughby children are descended from a long line of kings, warriors, explorers, artists and assorted other overachievers, all with lush magenta mustaches (including the women). However, the younger generation of Willoughbys seems destined for mediocrity, stuck with their neglectful parents in a kooky, Tim Burtonesque mansion.
Giddy and vibrant, “The Willoughbys” is something like “A Series of Unfortunate Events” delivered by way of Pixar, with a dash or Roald Dahl thrown in for good measure. Richly textured but flat visuals lend “The Willoughbys” some of the personality of drawn animation while retaining the extreme flexibility of digital. Like much classic children’s fiction, the film’s world — the world of grown-ups — is both threatening and absurd. This is shown as the Willoughby children struggle to navigate a city street packed with blindly wandering pedestrians, their faces buried in their smartphones.
Also distinguishing “The Willoughbys” is its unusual choice of theme: the fear that we will not prove equal to great men and women of yore. For the Willoughbys, this means sharing a house with hundreds of oversized portraits of pink-coiffed Alexanders and Einsteins.
Voice performances are uniformly good, with Seán Cullen deserving special notice for providing the strangled murmurs of Barnaby and Barnaby, a pair of creepy identical twins with only one sweater between them. Ricky Gervais delivers lively narration as a talking cat.
