ARTNEWSPRESS: DreamWorks ploughs a comfortable furrow with this engaging China-set fantasy
Coldplay’s 2005 tearjerker Fix You is shamelessly deployed in writer-director Jill Culton’s sweet animated DreamWorks feature, co-directed with Todd Wilderman, about a grieving Chinese girl who befriends an escaped yeti. When a real-life abominable snowman with five smiling milk teeth and a fuzzy felt face turns up on Yi’s (Chloe Bennet) roof in Shanghai, she insists on returning him to Mount Everest personally, dragging her vain neighbour Jin (Tenzing Norgay Trainor) and his dorky little cousin Peng (Albert Tsai) on the trip across China. Eddie Izzard and Sarah Paulson play the self-interested scientists who are on their tail.
The central relationship here is not dissimilar to the one in How to Train Your Dragon, (also produced by DreamWorks Animation) but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The yeti has a beautiful baritone that hums with magical powers, fuelling the film’s more creative flourishes: clouds are shaped like koi carp (“the fish of perseverance,” according to Yi’s mother); blueberries swell to the size of boulders; a field of yellow flowers folds in on itself like a spongy, surfable blanket.
https://theguardian.com
Simran Hans
