Mars Needs Moms – 2 Buckets

If there’s one thing I look for in a contemporary animated family film, it’s an interesting and rich set of characters. Unless the film in question was directed by Hayao Miyazaki, it would be just as unreasonable to expect an unconventional story as it would be to expect less-than-dazzling visuals. These are the confines of the genre. But when there are engaging, sympathetic, unique characters–the hallmarks of great recent works like Ratatouille and How to Train Your Dragon–then said confines can be transcended. Needless to say, Disney’s latest über-expensive animated effort, Mars Needs Moms, stands a boondoggle despite its technically-intensive visual style because the people and creatures that inhabit its world could not be less distinct.

The film begins on a Martian spaceship, where the aliens have an elaborate, but peculiarly black-and-white video surveillance system of Earth. On the display, they seem to be observing the behavior of American mothers, apparently targeting the strict ones for abduction. Cut to Earth, where one such mom (Joan Cusack) is disciplining her son Milo (Seth Green) for not eating his broccoli. This is the moment where Mars Needs Moms was designed to first forge a connection with the viewer by making them relate to the scene and therefore wax nostalgic about their own childhood. But the truth is, they’ll probably only be feeling nostalgia for what other Hollywood movies have conditioned them to think their childhood was like. How many people really had full-on domestic battles over broccoli? I can’t remember one in our house.

Anyway, before Milo and Mom can make peace over the broccoli incident, she is abducted by Martians in the front yard. He runs after her, and ends up on the ship before it blasts back into space. On the Red Planet, Milo is discovered and chased by Martian security, but escapes with the help of a fellow human renegade named Gribble (Dan Fogler), who maintains a hidden fortress outside the elaborate base-city. Gribble, a 20- or 30-something with the attitude of a boy Milo’s age, informs him that the Martians have abducted his mom as part of a decades-old plot to extract human mothers’ memories to train their “Nanny Bots,” machines that raise young Martians. Milo and Gribble have limited time to get Mom back before the extraction happens, and so the “adventure” begins.

Co-writer/director Simon Wells’ characters, adapted from those in the picture-book by Berkeley Breathed, are as thin and conventional as the plot that they service. Sure, there isn’t much depth to the average nine-year-old like Milo, but did he have to be the typical brat who realizes just how much he loves his mom when she is taken away from him? And there’s no excuse for the older characters. Gribble–a compound of “George Ribble,” we later learn–seems like he was randomly picked from the “eccentric, fatso sidekick” pile at Disney. When the funniest thing a character does is add superlatives to the end of his nickname–“Gribble-tastic” and “Gribble-awesome,” for instance–he generally isn’t what we call three-dimensional. And as for the Martians? The evil Supervisor (Mindy Sterling) is pretty much your average towering dictator, aside from her momentarily-engaging rule that only females are allowed in Martian society. In the shred of actual science-fiction in the film, the males are cast out onto the planet’s rocky surface, to be raised by those that came before them. Lastly, there’s Ki (Elisabeth Harnois), the “good Martian” who couldn’t be plainer as she helps Milo and Gribble out.

Thus far, I have spoken as if the dull characters are solely the fault of the filmmakers, but I suppose I can hold the performances responsible as well. After all, the film, produced by Robert Zemeckis, was made in the same motion-capture style of his The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol and, more famously, James Cameron’s Avatar. This means that the animated images were derived from the real-life actions of the cast, who had motion-sensors hooked up to every inch of their bodies. (As a result, Seth Green receives credit for Milo, even though a much younger actor, Seth Dusky, did the voice.) The result of the technology is a visually incredible movie, with the smoothest and most spatially-realized (if unfortunately still too dim) 3-D I have seen to date. But as for the performances themselves… I couldn’t tell any difference between the characters in Mars Needs Moms and those of an entirely computer-constructed animated-feature, as I could in Avatar. Aesthetically stunning as it is, one observation says all you need to know about the technology and Mars Needs Moms as a whole: the “how-we-did-it” behind-the-scenes footage of the actors running around with dots on their faces that plays over the credits is far more interesting than anything in the movie itself.

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Mars Needs Moms (2011, USA). Produced by Steven J. Boyd, Ryan Chan, Jack Rapke, Steve Starkey, Peter M. Tobyansen, and Robert Zemeckis. Directed by Simon Wells. Written for the screen by Simon Wells and Wendy Wells, based on the children’s book by Berkeley Breathed. Starring Seth Green, Dan Fogler, Joan Cusack, Elisabeth Harnois, Mindy Sterling, and Kevin Cahoon. Distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. Rated PG, with a running time of 88 minutes.