Plenty of movies get released directly to streaming services. I'm behind on a few myself, "The Sea Beast" from Netflix, "Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe" on Paramount+, and a Marmaduke movie... also on Netflix. These movies don't usually get a lot of attention, but as of now it has kind of been blowing up. I think in part due to the pandemic, more people are willing to wait for a movie to come to streaming than watch it in theatres, so a movie that skips theatres directly will probably get more attention now than before, even if it isn't a big release. Which is another thing to consider, Turning Red and Chip 'n Dale were released straight to Disney+, Netflix recently released a Rise of the TMNT movie, (Which No I am not going to talk about on here) and AppleTV+ recently released John Lasseter's first production outside of Pixar, Luck.
John Lasseter has been in some controversy recently, with allegations about indecent behavior towards female staff, the allegations don't seem as bad as John K's but they are still pretty bad, causing him to step down (or be fired I can't remember which) from Pixar in 2018. However, Skydance Media picked him up, and allowed him to be a producer on, what I believe to be their first animated production. Now let me be clear, this is all John Lasseter is on this production, a producer, and not even the only one. The director of this movie is Peggy Holmes who directed The Littler Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning and a couple Tinkerbell movies before this and has a large amount of Choreography credits for both animated and live-action movies. It's just that Lasseter is a bigger, and more controversial, name so that is going to be the name most associated with this movie.
I'm starting to worry that The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wilde was less a one off and more of an omen of sorts, because so many of these movies I would rather talk about this things going on around them rather than the movie themselves. Yep, Luck is another entry in the "Fantastically boring" category, one thing I will say is that I am absolutely infuriated by the plot. Here's a question, why is it whenever a human, or mortal or whatever, enters some weird fantastical world, they are always never meant to be there? Yes, we had Oz and Narnia but those stories are old, The Wizard of Oz was first published in 1900 and the first Narnia book was in 1950, in most other stories it's always the human needs to be hidden, needs to keep a low profile, why? Here is this amazing fantastical world and we got to creep around it for some dumb reason. Let's get a fantastical world that a human accidentally falls into and isn't told to keep hidden and creep around.
On top of that, most of the movie is watching this character endure through her bad luck, and I guess it's meant to be inspiring, like she can overcome this and learn from it, but I just found it a little annoying to sit through. Good characters going through awful scenarios can work in some cases, SpongeBob being targeted by a bully isn't funny because he's getting targeted by a bully, it's funny because of his reactions to everything around him, and the reactions to him. When someone like Donald Duck or Harold Green gets in a bad spot, you can't feel bad for them because they usually brought it on themselves, Sam, the lead character in this movie, isn't reacting to her scenarios in an out there way, and she isn't bringing these situations onto herself, and the bad luck isn't fantastical either, in many ways it's actually depressing. She was at an adoption center until she aged out. I guess this builds sympathy, but you need more than sympathy in a character.
As for everything else, I mean the animation is nice, but it looks absolutely unspectacular, you know how Pixar movies and Disney movies and DreamWorks movies all have amazingly vibrant colours and lighting? Luck doesn't really have any of that, it looks like an Illumination production, it looks like it's just here to get a job done and nothing more. The Land of Luck, I was expecting a very lush environment with a lot of greens and golds and coppers, but instead there was a lot of white and it looked very, corporate futuristic. It's not an unappealing movie to watch, but it's not one of the prettiest movies ever, it's better than Buck Wilde or Paws of Fury, but it's no Bob's Burgers or Bad Guys.
I don't honestly know what anyone was expecting here, I think this movie only got notoriety because of the association with John Lasseter, maybe someone was expecting this to be what "The Visit" was to M. Night Shyamalan, or "Hardwired... to Self-Destruct" was for Metallica, the one project that pulled them out of their doldrums, and if not saved, at least improved their reputation. Unfortunately, if this project is anything for Lasseter, it's more akin to John K's Cans Without Labels or Keiji Inafune's Mighty No. 9, the project that only proved to be the final nail in the coffin of their reputations. The sad thing is, those projects were actually better nails than this one, because Lasseter wasn't majorly involved in this movie, again he was a producer and not the only one. This project really makes me akin John Lasseter not to John K, but more to Butch Hartman. Everyone associates him with a few major pieces and then he attached his name to something, all the ego slips through. Butch Hartman created your childhood, John Lasseter was the greatest creative force at Pixar, and yet one went on to scam people with Oaxis, the other had a minor part and major credit in bringing the world yet another generically bad animated movie. Even if you are going to handwave away the allegations, this movie is not worth it.
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