SMALLFOOT

IN PROGRESS

'''SMALLFOOT. Karey Kirkpatrick, director, co-script, story (one of three), executive producer''' (one of eight). Jason Reisig, co-director. Clare Sera, co-script. John Requa, Glenn Ficarra, screen story with Karey Kirkpatrick, based on the book Yeti Tracks by Sergio Pagblos. See IMDb for full writing credits. Ronald A. Kurniawan, production design. USA (?): “Warner Brothers Presents” and distribution in US and most other listed countries, Warner Animation Group, Warner Animation, and Zaftig Films (production), 2018; see IMDB for details.

The Wikipedia entry describes Smallfoot as “a 2018 American 3D computer-animated musical comedy adventure film.” It is also a highly sophisticated children’s fantasy film and exercise in theological, philosophical, political, and pedagogic art. Relevant here is the revelation that central to Yeti survival has been hiding above the clouds from humans, who see Yetis as monsters and kill them with spears and later guns; and central to that hiding is a huge machine that Yeti outside of the theocratic leadership tend unknowingly: a high-tech/stone-age mechanism that vaporizes ice balls to produce the impenetrable clouds that hide Yeti civilization.

The Yeti don’t exactly write but pictographs show the history of the attacks by humans, and the pictographs might remind film students and fans of MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME and should remind adult viewers of the disaster for Incas, Aztecs, and other tribes from contact with the conquistadores. So the lesson for the kids is highly nuanced, as is that for scholars: Yeti civilization is based in a lie given an “objective correlative” in a vast under-ice/under-rock machine that the Yeti — or at least many of them — serve, a machine that produces nothing but steam that reinforces a lie … that has kept them isolated and ignorant of a larger world, but safe. As upbeat children’s’ fantasy — it’s a “musical comedy,” of sorts — the humans turn out to be decent and do not massacre, enslave, dissect, and/or relegate to zoos the Yeti, and the happy ending is the integration of a larger society of Yetis and humans, with the Yetis no longer needing to serve the machine and free of the weight of the Law (inscribed in pictograms on rocks schlepped around as a garment by Stonekeeper, their Moses-figure, in another elegant objective correlative). They also learn that the sun will rise without the necessity of using a giant crossbow to fire the inheritor of the role head-first into a gong to wake up the snail that bears the sun across the sky.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 26Oct18