
Victoria
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.
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A little boy named Ben goes to sleep in his room, surrounded by his toys
and magnifying glass, his unfinished drawings and scattered crayons.
Once his eyes finally close, the crayons pop to life. They take
a roll call and then leap into their crayon box,
which acts as a psychedelically-colored wormhole leading to a place called
"Color City," a land populated only by crayons. Color City is so
garishly colored that you ache for the grey crayon to bust a move and cover
it all with fog to give your eyes a break. "The Hero of Color
City," directed by Frank Gladstone, feels as though it was written by a
committee, and so it's not a surprise to see five
screenwriters listed in the credits. Even if you allow for the the fact that the film is geared towards the 5-year-old set, it's still a pretty
dreary experience, made even more so by screamingly vivid colors, uninspiring animation and grating songs.
Each crayon has a distinct personality, and the only moments of
originality emerge from those quirks. There's the lead, Yellow
(Christina Ricci), who is scared of everything. Green (Jess Harnell) is a
boring fuddy-duddy who pontificates about everything. Brown (Tom
Lowell) is a cowboy with a thick white Sam Elliott mustache. Blue (Wayne
Brady) is extroverted and confident. Red (Rosie Perez) is hot-tempered
and feisty. The crayons compete over what Ben has "used" each of them
for in his various drawings. Poor Black (David Kaye) is the Eeyore of
the group, throwing in deadpan comments showing his bleak outlook: "All
Ben ever uses me for is night." Or "Once in a while, I'm an outline." At
least Black gets used. The white crayon's "head" is still a pointy tip
because Ben never uses White at all!
Their nightly jaunts to Color City have seemingly no point except to
hang out with their own kind. They go visit a "spa" (run by a pink
crayon with a French accent) to get their tips re-shaped. They have to
be back before Ben wakes up, so they cram in as much Crayon-only time as
possible. But this particular trip to Color City goes awry because the
crayons are followed through the wormhole by two unfinished drawings of
Ben's, a giant king named King Scrawl and his flying round-bodied
sidekick named Gnat (Craig Ferguson). These unfinished drawings yearn to
be colored. It's not right that they remain just outlines. But the
residents of Color City treat these benign creatures as horrifying
interlopers, monsters that must be crushed and destroyed.
There's quite a bit of plot, and "The Hero of Color City" gets bogged
down in it, lacking the imagination to create something alive. The
"monsters" try to get the attention of the crayons by clogging up the
Rainbow Waterfall, the source of all the color in Color City. The
situation is dire. Without color, who would the crayons be? Of what use
will they be anymore if they fade? They band together and set out on a
"Heart of Darkness" type journey on a boat, to bring down the monsters
causing so much trouble. What is the story here? Not the plot, but the
story. It seems that "The Hero of Color City" wants, ultimately, to be
about how Yellow has to stop being "yellow", get over her fear of
everything and rise to the occasion courageously. Will she succeed? Will
she fail? But Yellow isn't a character. She's just a character trait.
And the film doesn't give the journey (actual and emotional) any sense
of high stakes. It's all just one thing happening after another,
interspersed by chirpy repetitive songs.
All of the characters are so one-note that the movie becomes formulaic almost
instantly. Some big event goes down, and inevitably we get Yellow
cringing in the corner, Blue cracking a joke, Black moaning about how
they are all doomed, Red making some feisty comment, and Brown trying to
round them all up with a lasso of commands. One need only consider "Toy Story"—with its depth of characterization, its
life-or-death stakes, and age-appropriate humor
that ends up working for all ages—to remember that films for children
do not need to be so simplistic.
This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr...
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