Movie Thoughts: Xico's Journey (2020)

• Released: 20 November 2020
• Directed by: Eric Cabello
• Running time: 1 h 25 min
• Rating 3/5

Synopsis

A girl, her best friend and her dog travel deep within a sacred mountain in order to save their town from being destroyed by a bunch of fracking capitalists. 

My Thoughts

Just a movie I randomly put on without much thought. The poster looked promising, at least. I've never heard of this movie before or even looked into it, so I went in completely blind.

And, honestly, it's nothing great, but nothing bad either. My main gripes are honestly probably with the animation: this is not general movie-quality animation. It's much closer to what you'd see on TV these days, using a type of puppet animation. And it's not like...great puppet animation, like in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. It's just your standard not-so-great looking animation. Poses and expressions often feel a bit recycled and stilted, the movement tends to look unnatural and it just generally doesn't look as good as movie animation these days usually does. Does this stop me from enjoying the movie? No, but it's definitely something to mention.

Another flaw is the quite atrocious blending of the 2D and 3D animation. You can very obviously tell that these are 2D characters on 3D CGI backgrounds a lot of the time. It does look quite distracting. There's definitely some neat painted non-3D backgrounds in this, but the CGI is very apparent and takes over most of the backgrounds in the movie. Just doesn't look so good.

Visuals aside, this was just a cute movie about taking care of the environment. The message is a bit ham-fisted, of course, as is most environmentalist media, but I liked the way it was presented here. At least they didn't have one of the characters directly break the fourth wall to narrate about how we should treat nature (looking at you, Pom Poko). 

The characters are all rather basic, but they do their jobs well enough. Honestly, the only one I didn't really get a clear impression of was Gus, he just didn't seem to have an actual personality or quirk to him. But Copi and Xico were definitely pretty good. That said, I do think that the title of this movie is a bit...odd. I mean, it's definitely Xico's journey, but Copi honestly feels more like our protagonist than him at times. Xico doesn't even talk until like 15 minutes into the movie, and even after that he (mostly) just remains a co-lead with Copi. He only becomes a major character in some scenes of the movie after Copi is dying, but outside of that I really feel like she was more our protagonist than he was. Maybe Copi and Xico's Journey would've been a better title? Or just Journey? 

Xico does definitely have a major part to play in the movie. After all, they spend most of the film looking for the messenger, only for them to realize in the end that Xico has been the one all along; he just didn't realize it. However, Copi is really the most proactive character in all of this. She's the one who started this journey and desperately wants to find the messenger, her mother and save the town. Xico definitely supports her, but, again, doesn't really become a major player that does his own thing until rather late into the movie.

The journey itself felt a bit mundane, but I do like some of the environments and concepts introduced in the world inside the mountain. The stag spirit also has a pretty neat design. The climax was a bit on-the-nose (divine intervention stops the capitalists) but definitely did its job well enough. 

I will say that the audio editing of this movie can be quite awful at times, with lines often being too low in volume to hear when other lines in the same scene were of the right loudness.

If you just want a cute movie to put on that doesn't make you think too hard, I think I can recommend this. Just don't expect Disney-quality animation.