Review: Playmobil: The Movie (Lino DiSalvo, 2019)

Fig. 1 - Playmobil: The Movie (Lino DiSalvo, 2019).

Unless you enjoy paying to watch one very long and annoying advert for a toyline you no longer play with, I suspect Playmobil: The Movie (Lino DiSalvo, 2019) isn’t for you. Based on an original story by Lino DiSalvo, Playmobil: The Movie (Fig. 1) tells the story of Marla (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Charlie Brenner (Gabriel Bateman), two siblings who are sucked into a Playmobil world filled with tacky plastic adventures and totally unmemorable side characters. If that doesn’t yet sound unappealing enough, I had to learn the hard way that this film is in fact a musical; suffice to say, the songs match the plot in terms of quality. I did not enjoy this film, and as much as I don’t want to seem wholly cynical, it’s impossible not to be when dealing with a film that so clearly exists only to capitalise on the success of The Lego Movie (Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, 2014) in order to market Playmobil, particularly when the execution and direction are so poor. Despite the fact that The Lego Movie effectively set out to achieve the same goals as Playmobil: The Movie, i.e. advertise and market a global brand, The Lego Movie didn’t feel like it was trying to sell the audience anything. There was a grounded plot with well-rounded characters and a surprisingly poignant moral about creativity and familial relationships. Playmobil: The Movie, however, has none of these things; there’s barely any substance to the film, no real plot or character development, and because of this it just feels like watching a poorly planned and hastily put-together advertising campaign with bright colours in the way to keep the audience distracted. Above all else, however, the film fails on the most crucial level: the film isn’t entertaining. The characters are either boring or annoying, the plot is just a series of vignettes to show the audience the various Playmobil sets that they can buy, and the overall themes of the film are so confused and forced that they never get around to actually spelling out what exactly the heart/moral of the film is (à la the scene in The Lego Movie between ‘The Man Upstairs’ [Will Ferrell] and his son Finn [Jadon Sand]). The result is simultaneously unpleasant and uninteresting, and feels like it was designed by a studio boardroom rather than a filmmaker or animator.

Fig. 2 - The fantasy of Playmobil: The Movie.

Fantasy-wise, it’s a little odd where this film chooses to go, and also when and when not it chooses to incorporate fantasy elements. Despite the bright colours and classic fantasy tropes like a magical medieval kingdom and characters’ acceptance of often nonsensical and surreal events (Fig. 2), the film also introduces uncomfortably real threats and takes weirdly dark turns with no real warning. The first of these is about ten minutes in, when immediately after we are serenaded by an extremely upbeat Marla joyfully dancing around her house, she opens the door to a pair of police officers who inform her that her parents have died in a car crash. This moment is not an isolated incident; later on, as Marla and the secret agent Rex Dasher (Daniel Radcliffe) are attempting to infiltrate a surveillance corporation’s headquarters, they are found out and threatened with torture. While this in itself feels out of place and inappropriate, it signifies a much larger problem the film has with its relationship to fantasy: it has no idea when it wants to be fantastical and strange, and when it wants to be sobering and emotional. This is not to suggest that fantasy and emotion are mutually exclusive, but rather that the film treats them like they are. The film is preoccupied with using fantasy to exhibit as many different Playmobil collections as possible, and subsequently fails to set-up the main emotional beats of the film. Instead of focusing on character development and audience investment, the film just tries to cram as many Playmobil sets into the film as it can, often with little reason for them actually being there. Fantasy already requires a relatively high level of suspension of disbelief, particularly when the in-universe rules are so inconsistent, so if a film decides to be extremely obvious about its intentions as a marketing campaign, the artistic integrity of the film begins to fall apart. The facade of fantasy is used as a catch-all explanation for why Playmobil: The Movie can jump from place to place without any real consequences, and the result feels cheap and lazy.

Fig. 3 - Imperfect character design in The Lego Movie.

The cheapness of its narrative thankfully doesn’t extend to its animation style, which is perhaps one of the film’s most redeeming qualities, but even then it’s nothing particularly special. Much like The Lego Movie, Playmobil: The Movie has the benefit of being able to effectively take the plot in whichever direction it wants because of the world that it sets up; the coexistence of various different settings and landscapes, ranging from the Old West to a futuristic city, gives the writers and director a fantasy sandbox in which they have almost total creative freedom. Yet despite this, where The Lego Movie used this variety of influences to create a playful and toybox-like on-screen experience via its kinetic animation style and brilliant art direction, here the adherence to Playmobil’s visuals as a pre-existing product feels stale and corporate. Any large group of characters from the same theme, for example the vikings at the beginning of the film, all use pretty much the same character model because of the lack of variation in Playmobil figurines, which makes any scene that they’re in come off as a little rushed and visually boring. This isn’t at all to say that they’re badly done, in fact it’s very impressive what the designers, modellers and animators have managed to do given the story they were handed. The problem is that, in theory, the visuals should be eye-catching and colourful (bearing in mind this is a film aimed at children), and while there are several moments that deliver some impressively constructed imagery, a lot of the scenery falls flat, not as a result of the artists and modellers behind the film but more because Playmobil itself isn’t actually all that aesthetically interesting. The Lego Movie could have potentially had the same issue in terms of the uniformity of the Lego figures, but instead adapted and incorporated it into the story (in the film, the main character Emmet [Chris Pratt] avoids capture because his face is so generic that the evil Lord Business [Will Ferrell] can’t find him in his databases). Where The Lego Movie leaned into the imperfections and nostalgia of the real Lego toys, utilising the ACES Colour Encoding System to give the appearance of stop-motion (Fig. 3), Playmobil: The Movie instead relies on the actual designs of Playmobil, which aren’t exactly a work of artistic genius. This is not helped by the rendering of the film, which looks adequate at best and sub-par at worst. Sets like the Roman city that Maximus controls use unvaried texturing on the buildings and props, and while this does help sell the idea that everything is made of plastic, the environment’s strange smoothness and lack of proper detail spoil the illusion that this is anything except CG (Fig. 4). In the end, it’s really the rendering itself that holds the visual identity of this film back; because it’s been done on a budget, a lot of the film looks more akin to television animation rather than cinema. The choice to render this film relatively realistically (i.e. 24 frames per second and semi-accurate shading and shadows), as opposed to stylising it like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, 2018), ultimately serves to its detriment. The artists and animators who crafted the world and characters of this film are limited by the inelegance of Playmobil figurines and models, as well as the constraints of the unimpressive rendering.

Fig. 4 - Playmobil: The Movie.

Playmobil: The Movie will inevitably fade into obscurity, as all poorly made adverts do. Its story and characters are weak, its humour and songs are annoying, and its overall aesthetic is mediocre at best. It’s impossible to watch this film without seeing the corporate team behind it, and no amount of fantasy imagery can disguise its intentions to market Playmobil to the audience. I don’t doubt that children will enjoy this film, at least on some level - it’s loud and colourful, which usually qualifies as entertainment for 4-7 year olds. It will be quickly forgotten, however, and said 4-7 year olds will just as quickly move onto other loud, colourful and hopefully better films and TV shows. Playmobil: The Movie is to the The Lego Movie as Thomas Kinkade is to J. M. W. Turner: kitschier, more saturated, and lacking any real artistic integrity.

Biography

Jamie Morrison is a student, writer and illustrator about to start a degree at Arts University Bournemouth in Animation Production. His experience ranges from writing about obscure magic realist TV shows to designing posters for a totally unknown indie flick (and he will not shut up about the fact that he got an IMDb credit for it). His obsession with pop-culture is only outdone by his passion for animation. His collection of strange illustrations and cartoons can be found on his Instagram and Twitter (@ediblecheese).