Money, Mediocrity, and the Moon

                                                                            Money, Mediocrity, and the Moon

“We don’t make movies to make more money. We make money to make more movies.” - Walt Disney

There is a reason that film and animation are referred to as industries. All industries are inherently businesses. Businesses put profit above all. And animated films, even cinema as a whole, often suffer because of it. 

In short, Over the Moon (Keane, 2020) sent me anywhere but. A perfect and honestly impressive blend of mediocrity, to say it was a blasé experience would be an understatement. Using nearly every animation trope that has proven time and time again to be safely profitable, the Netflix film tells a story that falls short in originality and emits a frustrating blandness amongst all its visual achievements. Money is far too often held above truly free and original artistic creation, and Over the Moon is a prime example. 

The film began with the intriguing setting of a modern-day village in China. Immediately, the animation was impressive, especially for a feature-length CGI Netflix animation: an inviting set of colors and a warm and tangible set of textures swathing every object. The main character is a likeable adventurous young girl named Fei Fei (Cathy Ang). At a young age, Fei Fei’s mother (Ruthie Ann Miles) tells her the legend of the moon goddess, Chang'e (Phillipa Soo), who drank a potion of immortality which caused her to become a goddess and ascend to the moon. However, she accidentally left her mortal lover Houyi behind on earth, and is destined to await him on the moon for eternity. Fei Fei and her family prepare for their town’s annual Moon Festival, however, her mother tragically falls ill. She gives her daughter a rabbit named Bungee as her last gift before passing away. Four years later, Fei Fei is upset when she learns that her father (John Cho) has found a new love, and meets her irritating soon-to-be-step-brother Chin (Robert G. Chiu). Inspired by the legend of Chang'e, one of the main connections Fei Fei had to her mother, she decides to build a rocket to the moon to prove that Chang'e is real. 

Conceptually, I believe the film could have been great. The problem was its execution. There was nothing new. It felt like a mishmash of every animated cliché I’d ever seen, specifically in Disney movies. Brian Tallerco from RogerEbert.com described it as “a film that so blatantly cribs from other popular works that it never develops a personality of its own.” There’s the tragically deceased parent, personified animal sidekick, midroll identity crisis, purposefully annoying comic relief characters; not to mention the musical numbers. While all these steps made for a fantastic run of Disney classics that represented the peak of animated storytelling at the time, they’ve been done to death, and no longer bring something new and exciting to the table — especially not when they are presented in such a redundant way. Even in its drollness, Over the Moon did not start out particularly ghastly, but there was one scene that definitely sealed its unfortunate fate. 

It all came crashing down — literally — as soon as Fei Fei left the warm, inviting, and full-of-life setting of her hometown on earth, and ends up crash landing on the moon after discovering Chin stowed away on her homemade rocketship. I don’t know what I expected the moon goddess’ kingdom to look like, but it definitely wasn’t this. In such stark contrast to the moon’s bleak gray surface and the oddly blank span of darkness above the horizon, Chang’e’s kingdom is revealed to be a painfully neon city of blobs: every creature and object textureless, uncomfortably soft and round, and so incredibly undetailed it almost looks unfinished in comparison to the absorbingly stunning scenes just ten minutes prior. 

The preschool-esque downgrade continued with the revelation of Chang’e herself. I almost had to double check if I was watching the right movie — as soon as she appears on screen, the entire scene rapidly morphs into a jarringly out of place pop concert music-video. There are multiple close up shots of her face looking directly into the camera, overtly energetic cuts in footage, and borderline cringeworthy shots of Chin and other background characters dancing along. While the song Chang’e sings isn’t awful by itself, the entire scene just seemed so tonally seperate compared to the rest of the film. Chang’e was set up to be this elegant figure who would provide an apt parallel to Fei Fei’s story, and it was clear that they would help each other learn to move on from their respective losses, and they eventually do towards the end of the film — but every other moment Chang’e’s character is framed as almost a diva-like figure who cares about nothing except keeping her own immortality. In all honesty, I felt her portrayal cheapened Over the Moon to an irredeemable point. 

When the film was finally over, I began to ponder if I had just wasted and hour and a half of my life, but in doing so my eyes caught something in the credits of the film. It was a name I had seen somewhere before: Glen Keane. After a bit of research, Netflix’s monotonous experiment began to make a little more sense. Keane, the director of the film worked as a character animator during Disney’s “renaissance” period. Tarzan, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas; there is a grandiose list of unforgettable classics he worked on. Clearly, the named “Disney Legend” has a background that left a magnificent impact on his directing style. 

So, part of the mystery was solved. Keane’s storytelling ability seems to rest on an unmovable mountain of Disney, but if that were truly the case, shouldn’t I had just seen a masterpiece equitable to so many of the films Keane has worked on? There had to be something more. After a bit more Internet sleuthing, I discovered another equally if not more telling aspect about the film’s production. 

While Netflix animated the film alongside Sony Pictures Imageworks, Over the Moon was also produced by Pearl Studio — an animation studio initially founded by DreamWorks in 2012 with the help of Chinese investors. Originally named “Oriental DreamWorks,” the studio co-produced a few DreamWorks projects over the years, but released their first feature-length co-animated film Kung Fu Panda 3 in 2016, and recently debuted their first original film Abominable in 2019, still produced under the DreamWorks umbrella.  When I found that Abominable was also produced by Pearl Studio, the mediocrity of Over the Moon finally clicked. Though I have not seen the full film, I remembered a review I watched on YouTube shortly after Abominable’s release, that also spoke of an insufferable blandness throughout and specifically described the film as “consumable slush” that is ultimately “just another project for another profit, that feels pretty meaningless.”  The comparisons between Abominable and Over the Moon are suspiciously abundant: the main characters are both young girls from China who have lost a parent; they discover a mythological element within their universe; they takes along a cast of wacky side characters and they both go on magical adventures to ultimately help them deal with their grief. 

  Abominable, 2019

Over the Moon, 2020

Obviously, the film is not bad because it focuses on Chinese characters in a Chinese setting; in fact, I really enjoyed learning about a traditional Chinese myth I likely would’ve never heard of without watching Over the Moon. The film suffers because of why it focuses on Chinese characters in a Chinese setting.  

According to China's Encounter with Global Hollywood, a book by Wendy Su from 2016, “although China’s reformers have long suggested that the film sector should be considered both a creative venture and a moneymaking business... More than two-thirds of all [Chinese] domestic films that were directly or indirectly funded and guided by the government were produced according to the government’s plan rather than the audience’s needs. In China, cinema remains an important propaganda tool and is heavily loaded with party-sanctioned ideology. The film sector’s embarrassing status as a government tool that is nevertheless responsible for its own economic efficiency leads to fundamental problems in production, distribution, and exhibition processes.” China’s film industry is still very much under government control, and as such, the restrictions on what can be shown are much tighter than the rest of the world. This has reduced the sheer number of films produced in China, but also makes it very difficult for outside, mainly western or American created films to be shown there, since they do not comply with Chinese film standards. 

Even so, no studio or production company can deny the appeal of the Chinese market, with its seemingly unlimited financial opportunities. This means that any films that any studio produces, Chinese or otherwise, must be “safe” for China, and as such, must incorporate the country and culture into the film while also making it relatable to a western audience. The absolute peak of what corporate servility feels like, Abominable was a perfect segway for Pearl Studio to allow DreamWorks into China’s untapped billion-member audience. Combined with the profitability of animated films designed and cheapened for children, and hence innately “safe,” the possibilities for profit in China must seem endless to any studio willing to work with Pearl. 

Over the Moon is just the second example of the same marketization. A perfect storm of a strictly soporific animation studio, Disney’s tried and true storytelling beats, and an overarching demand for profitability; there is a clear elucidation behind the film’s terribly mediocre nature.