Directed By Seth Worley

Starring – Tony Hale, D’Arcy Carden, Bianca Belle

The Plot – When a young girl’s (Belle) sketchbook falls into a strange pond, her drawings come to life-chaotic, real and on the loose. As the towns descends into chaos, her family must reunite and stop the monsters they never meant to unleash.

Rated PG for scary action, some violence, thematic elements, adult language and rude humor.

SKETCH | Official Trailer | In Theaters Aug 6 | Angel

POSITIVES

Consider it a backhanded irony for my preconceived fear of Angel Studios movies, based on quite a few year’s-worst stinkers, but “Sketch” is a touching homage to the kinds of vulnerable kids movies we all grew up adoring, featuring some stirring choices to its creativity that proves innovative inspiration on and off of the screen that should offer something for every demographic of its audience. For starters, the movie has an unforeseen edginess to its material that pushes the PG rating as far as it can possibly go, both with palpable tension to its peril throughout some trying action sequences for our protagonists, but also subject matter in the film’s many talking points that emphatically conveys that this movie supplants a little attitude to its characters, allowing them to feel all the more approachably human by the imperfections they’re all articulately bound by. Beyond this, the movie has a lot of respect for its child characters, allowing them the expressive essence to showcase their talents throughout carrying the film’s most defining moments, while Tony Hale’s typical unrestricted eagerness takes a step back to enact heart to a reeling father who is continuously trying to keep matters together under this household. While the kids aren’t given the best comedic material to bounce off of, their ample personalities more than make up for the limitations inspired off-screen by elements out of their control, challenging them emotionally in ways that are typically difficult for child actors to effectively register, which in turn underlines the exploration with the kind of affection that elevates the engagement. The best of the child trio, at least for my money, is definitely 14-year-old Kue Lawrence, who already after a dazzling debut in this year’s “Marshmallow”, proves he’s here to stay with expressive efforts years ahead of his inexperience, which help gravitate so many of these personal scenes between he and Bianca Belle not only with the care and concern that they have for one another as siblings, but also exhilarating responses from the boy who conveys the magnitude of the situation in front of them, making it all the easier to understand why a majority of the film centers around this youthful ensemble. As for the documented special effects throughout the movie’s marketing, there is a bit of a lack of believability that comes from so many exaggerated creature designs, but I actually find the uncanny bizarreness of the imagery to work well alongside the creative capturing of a little girl’s imagination, allowing it to stand out for all of the best reasons, instead of something we judge by texture alone. What’s beneficial is that the movie takes so much time to flesh out a variety of creatures during its opening act, allowing us insight not only into their respective capabilities, but also artistic admiration in how each of them are seamlessly brought to life in immense scope and scale, and considering the abundance of color and imaginative essence to their designs provides a false narrative to their intensity and ferocity, it’s fun to experience what each one uniquely brings to the table, infusing the atmosphere with a Jumanji kind of sensibility that grew all the more bigger and elaborate with each successive arrival. Lastly, while the script undoubtedly and inescapably has its issues, I found the message of the movie successful towards attaining a charming and knowledgeable center to the movie’s integrity, inspiring youthful audiences the accessibility to express the conflicts that eat away at them, instead of letting them reside within. It’s the kind of lesson that definitely opens your eyes to the unorthodox ways that people exercise their own demons that we as a society irresponsibly judge before we’ve had a chance to understand why the artist has chosen that route, as a result of the graphic nature of the content, however it teaches absorbing minds the idea of understanding at a time we could all use a little more empathy towards one another, all without weighing down the aforementioned edginess of the atmosphere with the sweetly saccharine that could compromise so much of the movie’s vital personality.

NEGATIVES

While “Sketch” might be one of the year’s most surprisingly entertaining watches, in terms of preconceived expectations, the tragedy comes in the realization that this is a good movie that deserves to be great, but isn’t because of so many key hinderances that often made this a conflicting engagement, particularly during the opening act, which took far too long for me get faithfully invested. Part of the issue is that the first 30 minutes of the movie spends so much time setting up the characters and their respective conflicts that it completely telegraphs the destinations of these characters prematurely, but the bigger issue for me is in how long it takes the primary conflict to materialize in an 87-minute engagement that definitely could’ve used more urgency to the storytelling, taking until around the film’s midway point before it finally materialized into the film that didn’t weigh as heavily on the patience of the audience. On top of the first act, the film falls suspect to some frequent tonal clashes that didn’t exactly serve the material well, with the comedy side of the equation lacking the fun and frenzy of the movie’s science-fiction. These are two genres that could easily work well with one another if they both wielded a vital importance to the experience, but the comedy is the same kind of cutesy juvenile crudeness in consistency that typically condemns kids movies into the same unflattering shared universe between them, with overwhelming silence in the various deliveries of the punchlines that made me groan with disappointment, especially in how they constantly reach for the lowest hanging fruit imaginable. This is the only area of the film that constantly reminded me that it is a kid movie at the end of the day, but I still don’t take that as an excuse for the laziness that plagued it from finding a healthy balance of its own alongside the action heavy sequences, with dialogue so obnoxiously void of subtlety or naturalism that it stands out abrasively, each time one of the child actors reach so forcefully towards it. Finally, most of the film’s technical components are passable at best, or undistracting at worst, but I found some lazy choices with the color grading inside of the movie’s cinematography that plagued some scenes with artificial emphasis in post-production, instead of utilizing some production value in the set designs to appraise a far more immersive appeal to the influence of these otherworldly creatures. Part of me is willing to look the other way with scenes that beckon touched up color grading to airborne resonating in ways that persist without rubbing off on the clothes of the human characters, as a result of limitations to an evidentially small budget, but it’s one of those key artistic decisions that garners more distractive emphasis to the ugliness of the obscured imagery, rather than articulate the creatures influence on an environment, and it stands as the lone bad decision to a production that otherwise fired on all cylinders, condemning so much artistic appeal pertaining to a movie that values imagery above all else.

OVERALL
“Sketch” effectively illustrates a hearty center to the kinds of fantastically imaginative kids movies that we grew up adoring, pitting its child characters fearlessly at the forefront of the movie’s conflict, with underlining tension to the depths of their peril that stings seamlessly from Seth Worley’s debut directorial effort. While the film’s momentum and finished product ultimately and unfortunately are deduced slightly by ironically over-embracing their own creativity, the film’s meaty message of embracing an expressive outlet for child trauma proves its heart is in the right place, a personal first for Angel Studios who draw on the lessons of their own past mistakes

My Grade: 6.6 or C+