Sometimes, I find it strange that people think things are acceptable just because they are animated. Like in Leap, a new animated family movie about an aspiring ballerina that spends part of its third act following a crazy lady who tries to kill two orphan kids. Yes, I get it they’re animated. But the decision here is so forced and mean-spirited that it’s not even like Elmer Fudd trying and failing to murder Bugs Bunny, it’s more like something out of a grim and ugly and worst of all, unnecessary horror movie.
Leap is the story of Felicie (voiced by Elle Fanning) and her friend Victor (voiced by Nat Wolff), who escape from an orphanage on the outskirts of France and head to Paris to follow their dreams. Victor’s dream is to invent some way for people to fly; Felicie wants to be a dancer. Her dream drives the plot as she quite literally stumbles into the most prestigious dance company in Paris, where she meets Odette (voiced by Carly Rae Jepsen), who becomes her mentor and mother figure after approximately three days.
After Felicie steals an invitation to attend the famed dance company from a talented but bratty rival (voiced by Maddie Ziegler), she starts attending classes while Odette secretly trains her behind everyone’s backs because, again, she really only met this child several days ago herself. Odette used to be a dancer herself, but her background as such is mentioned maybe once before being abandoned completely. Then eventually Felicie’s ruse is discovered by the evil mother of her bratty rival (voiced in typically over the top fashion by SNL standout Kate McKinnon), and Felicie has to fight for her right both to remain in class at the company and also continue competing with everyone else for the lead role in some big-ass production or else get sent back down to the orphanage.
There are nice moments in Leap, but there’s also a lot of stuff that will make your head hurt like a montage of Victor telling Felicie about his own Paris adventure that he describes as triumphant while we watch footage of him falling down a lot and at one point lighting his farts on fire. Yes, this is a lovely movie about a little girl who has big dreams in ballet, and it includes a scene where a little boy lights his fart on fire. Because Hollywood hates you and wants your kids to fail all their tests.
Of the various great examples throughout Leap of how very little Hollywood cares for children or their precious little brains, I present to you the third act, which begins with Felicie deciding to go on a date with some jerk fellow dancer (voiced by Tamier Kapelian) instead of practicing for the single most important moment of her young life. She then promptly tells Jepsen’s kindly Odette “You’re not my mother” without being asked anything even close to that question and storms out so she can skip practice and be with this boy. That this turns out to have been a mistake on Felicie’s part that she quickly regrets is guaranteed from the moment it happens, but what’s more important is that it was allowed by the film’s incredibly lazy forced writing and plot construction, which displays no respect toward its audience or even its own characters.
Given that up to this point in the movie Felicie’s character has been tested by her cheating her way into the ballet school but once she gets into the ballet company the story becomes about her passion and dedication. The third act chucks all of that character development in favor of a forced, nonsensical plot conflict because the people who made Leap didn’t care to put in the work to create a more genuine conflict that didn’t undercut their main character.
And this brings me back to the scene I mentioned before where McKinnon’s evil mother character chases Felicie and Victor with murderous intent. The scene begins with this large, evil woman whacking Victor in the head with a wrench. She then chases Felicie with the wrench in hand, chasing her up to the top of a tall statue with the intent of pushing her off to her death. But don’t worry, I won’t spoil it for you.
This scene along with pretty much all of the third act is filled with horrific, irritating, and pathetic contrivance. Either it’s horrible like the scene I described or its predictable like the ending or it’s vulgar screenwriting 101 malarkey with a full on false crisis, false dawn, real crisis, real dawn structure. Yes, because no one has ever seen that Robert McKee garbage anywhere before. I realize that children don’t know or care about screenplay structure but lazy movies like Leap that fall back on Hollywood’s most overused cliches are why children grow into adults who don’t demand more of their entertainment.
When kids are continuously bombarded by movies that are just good enough or that are not so bad that they are offensive it sets a tone that can last their entire life where they consume art and simply accept good enough. So what I am saying is don’t see Leap because you should demand more from movies for kids than just standard plots with simple, easy-to-consume structures. Their young minds demand more than murderous old hags and fart-lighting gags.
That leads me to another thing that stinks about Leap, the first two acts are not terrible. There is a lovely coming of age tale buried under the ugly commercial contrivances. The reason Leap fails is that the makers don’t trust the audience to simply be inspired by a young girl’s dream to dance. Instead, they underestimate and insult the young target audience by making her dream into a predictable mess of lowest common denominator storytelling and gags.
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