Movie Thoughts: The Willoughbys (2020)

• Released: 22 April 2020
• Directed by: Kris Pearn, Cory Evans, Rob Lodermeier
• Running time: 1 h 30 min
• Rating 3/5

Synopsis

Four siblings decide to orphan themselves by getting rid of their neglectful parents, only for them to wind up learning lessons about what true family is like.

My Thoughts

Another movie I'm late to the party to, since I planned on reviewing it shortly after it came out last year. Ah, well, what can you do.

Now that I've finally checked it out, I can say I'm... mixed on this film.

First, the good stuff: the visuals. This movie has a wonderfully unique stylized look to it. It has a lower framerate and just the character designs are very unique, though you can still see in the Willoughby family that they're all related by their slightly similar shapes. The texture also has this wonderful yarn-like feel to it that's just really neat-looking.

That said, that's kind of where my enthusiasm for this movie ends. I did like the premise, four children trying to actively become orphans in order to get rid of their horrible parents sounded like a really fun premise. But, honestly, the whole "become orphans" thing seems solved pretty soon after they send Mother and Father on their vacation trip. In reality it isn't, but the movie after that becomes more slice-of-life with the four children trying to figure out a way to stay together and be a real family.

The characters also were pretty one-note to me. Tim just wants to live up to the legacy of his lineage, Jane likes to sing, the twins are the cliché "creepy" two halves of one person trope, Nanny is just your generic nice parental figure, etc. They do go through minor development, but none of it feels as major. Tim mostly just apologizes to his siblings after messing up and that's pretty much most of his arc. I didn't feel very engaged in these characters. Heck, even my favorite, Nanny, just wasn't all that intersting.

I also was quite distracted by these characters often not having names. Nanny is just Nanny (her real name is Linda, but everyone calls her Nanny). The parents are literally called Mother and Father despite loathing their children, so it doesn't even make logical sense for them to refer to one another by these titles.

In the end we do get the great found-family trope, but I felt we spent too little time with some of the characters they end up with (the candy-maker and his baby barely appear in the movie, yet we're supposed to be they're great found family material). I get that they want to stay with Nanny, she's proven to be a good supportive character and parental figure to the siblings, but the other two just kind of feel shoehorned into the found family.

Another thing holding me back from really enjoying this movie is the way the dialogue was handled. I don't know what exactly did it for me, but I just couldn't get into the dialogue of this film. Maybe it's the twins often just randomly repeating words that have been said before, but it was just really distracting and continuously took me out of the movie.

So, yeah, this wasn't a great film. I did want to like it because I heard some really positive things about it, and the visuals were absolutely great, but the rest just held it back for me too much. I do grant it three stars rather than two and a half like I planned to because of the visuals, but just don't expect a great movie or anything.