Flora and ulysses1/21/2024 The one thing that makes the movie worth watching is Flora herself. It’s telling that the power that gets the most plot weight and screen time is his ability to hash out rudimentary poems. Ulysses’ super powers don’t even add much to the story, since a lot of the chasing involves Flora, her father, or William stashing him somewhere. While there are moments of genuine emotion between animal-chase scenes - like when Flora shows up at her dad’s new supermarket job and tries to save him from his pedantic manager - the movie just features too much fruitless running around. Pudi’s villain character feels shoehorned in to give the story a conflict that’s more concrete than a broken family learning to bond again. Those antics tonally distract from the rest of the movie. Cue “running away with a squirrel fugitive” antics. But bringing the squirrel out in public attracts the attention of an animal control officer (Danny Pudi). Flora decides she needs to figure out Ulysses’ purpose as a hero, and enlists the help of her father and her neighbor’s visiting nephew William (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), who is temporarily blind following a hysteria-induced incident. He not only understands humans, he writes poetry using Flora’s mom’s typewriter. The squirrel - which Flora names Ulysses after the brand of vacuum cleaner that nearly kills him - has super-strength and some limited flying ability. That is, until she rescues a squirrel from a runaway vacuum cleaner and discovers he has super powers. Flora once believed in superheroes, but her parents’ struggling marriage has forced her to re-evaluate her relationship with hope and idealism. Still, it’s heartwarming and charming enough to support its message of family coming together and moving forward.īased on the book of the same name by popular children’s author Kate DiCamillo (who also wrote Because of Winn-Dixie and The Tale of Despereaux), Flora & Ulysses follows Flora, the daughter of a struggling comic book artist (Ben Schwartz) and a once-prolific romance novelist (Alyson Hannigan). But it gets bogged down by animal-chase capers and metatextual references to Disney properties. The core of Flora & Ulysses is a sweet family story, bolstered by Lawler’s sharp performance. The heart of the film is 10-year-old self-proclaimed cynic Flora (Matilda Lawler), who’s caught up in her parents’ financial and marital problems, and just trying to make sense of the world. In fact, if Flora & Ulysses were lighter on the squirrel antics, the family comedy from director Lena Khan ( Tiger Hunter) and screenwriter Brad Copeland ( Arrested Development) actually might work better. That squirrel doesn’t end up commanding as much of the movie as the trailers suggest. But that isn’t what the movie’s trailer promised: it focuses almost entirely on the shenanigans of a superpowered squirrel. The Disney Plus original movie Flora & Ulysses is a story about a broken family learning to understand each other again.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |