Tuesday, October 12, 2021

A Strange Halloween 4 - The Addams Family (2019)

A family that’s mysterious and cooky to the end
Their antics drive their neighbours round the bend
But change can shake things to the core
You can choose to embrace it or show you abhor

A mansion of misfits, shunned by the light
Does not protect them from internal strife
A perfect reflection is yet to be seen
As we continue A Strange Halloween


After Addams Family Values, which we will be getting to, disappointed at the Box Office, the Addams family franchise was left dormant. In 2010, Illumination entertainment, best known for the blight on humanity otherwise known as the Minions, were working on creating a stop motion Addams family project, certainly an interesting take. Tim Burton was set to direct but for whatever reason it fell through. In 2013, MGM, now owners of Orion pictures, the studio behind the 90's films, announced it would be making an animated take on the cooky family.

Now, MGM has a long history of producing animation, being the studio behind the original Tom and Jerry shorts, among others but their production of late is fairly slim pickings. They’re certainly not on the same level as something like Disney or even Illumination. CG is certainly a relatively new field for them, and they were only given a $23m budget for it. Still, the film was commercially successful, earning back $203m, but it divided critics with only a 44% Rotten Tomatoes rating

So, how does this animated Addams family show up? Let’s take a look.

We get a little origin story to start us off, Gomez and Morticia saying their wedding vows before the entire family is chased off by an angry mob. They run into an escaped mental patient Lurch who becomes their butler because of course he does and the find a condemned, seemingly haunted building which becomes their new home.

It’s a few years later, the family has grown with children Pugsley and Wednesday, they’ve lived a sheltered life but growing up comes with its own challenges. Wednesday’s curiosity is piqued by the idea of life outside of the house and Pugsley has to prepare for his Sabre Mazurka, which in this will basically be an allegory for a Bar-Mitzvah as opposed to a dance. And as not all threats are internal, an interior designer named Margaux Needler sees their house as a threat to her property development/renovation show and vows to get rid of it, whatever it takes.

OK, if there’s a running theme in the Addams family that’s ratcheted up to 11 in this story it’s prejudice. It’s not a theme unknown to this franchise, we’ve seen it with antagonists in the previous film to an extent and it does make a lot of sense since Addams family are, by definition a family that doesn’t fit in the typical family mould.

But in an interesting twist on that angle, prejudice is not just an external conflict to the Addams family, it’s an internal one too. The focus in this film is a lot more on the children than the adults and there’s an angle of the Addams’ family being just as judgemental about things like bright pink hair clips as the townsfolk are of things like their pet lion, yeah, they have a pet lion in this, ok.

Pugsley’s plotline is basically this conflict in a nutshell. Pugsley is going to be judged on his swordplay but he’s not good at it, his specialty, in this film anyway, is demolition and explosives. Taking full advantage of the medium of animation, this film uses a lot of slapstick in addition to its usual brand of comedy, not that slapstick was off the table for other films, but stuff like Wednesday firing a crossbow and it hitting Fester would not have looked good in live action.

The Addams Family themselves look pretty decent, though if your only experiences with the family are through the live action adaptations, some of the designs may take getting used to, they’re based on the original comic designs. What aren’t are the designs of the regular folks and… Here’s where the budget probably came back to bite them. The human designs are very stylised which in another film might’ve even worked but the problem the contrast between the humans and the Addams is lessened, which is kinda a problem when most of the film revolves around the prejudices.

That and level to which the prejudice is ratcheted up makes it more comical than poignant. The village mob of the mid-late 2010s have a f*cking trebuchet just lying about. It was difficult to believe in the flashback but in the semi-present day? These are the same people that needed a flaming torch app instead of flaming torches.

Here’s another example, with the Wednesday story. Incoming paraphrased quote

“My mother reacted well, she was accepting of my pink hair clip, I hate that”

“I’m running away because this family doesn’t accept things that are different”

And to really cap this I need to go through the ending, so major spoiler alert

So Margaux has cameras on everyone in the town for no other reason than facilitating this bs ending. Basically, her plan had been to use social media to rile up the townsfolk so they’d march on the Addams, it works as the arrival of the other Addams for Pugsley’s Mazurka further riles them up. But everything unravels as the house is near demolished, saved only by Wednesday (and Pugsley too, I guess) and more-so the sentient tree Ichabod.

They see that the Addams are just a family and lay down their arms, save for Margaux who is exposed for being a creepy stalker on a livestream. The secrets that the townsfolk hold are… well, if it works for you I guess. So, everyone’s weird in their own way and even Margaux gets a semi-happy ending as Fester ends up buying all the houses in the town to house the family and he and Margaux live together now… huh?

So, yeah this is really saccharine and makes it feel like resolving prejudice is just that easy. And I’m sorry but no, it isn’t that easy. Prejudice is a problem that’s lasted for generations and likely will never fully go away, sure the nature of said prejudice may change, but we, by our very nature judge others based on what we see first. This does not make us bad people; it rather depends on how and in some cases whether we act on it.

This ending is insulting and we haven’t talked about the music yet. I like that it takes some audio cues from the iconic Addams’ family theme song, even doing a rendition of it at the end, though followed by a truly abysmal Quavo alternative. They use pop songs throughout and few of them feel especially fitting. Maybe there could’ve been other uses for that budget.

The Addams family (2019) is not very good, the Addams’ designs and vocal performances alongside some decent puns and slapstick gags mean there is promise to this as a franchise but its main theme is unfortunately dumbed down and mishandled, nullifying its meaning and honestly also making the comedy lesser as a result. The animation is OK, I’m not expecting Pixar level on 1/10th of their budget though the human characters needed a redesign.

Rating 45/100

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