The One and Only Ivan
Managing director – Thea Sharrock
Cast – Angelina Jolie, Sam Rockwell, Bryan Cranston, Helen Mirren, Danny DeVito, Brooklynn Prince
With enough Oscar winners in his role to hide a Vanity Fair red carpet, The One and Only Ivan is yet another high-profile children’s film that Disney dumped online during the pandemic. Former franchisee Artemis Fowl was roasted at release, and now all eyes are on Mulan, the most expensive film ever made by a female filmmaker with a reported budget of $ 200 million. The One and Only Ivan, to use a network TV analogy, feels like lead-in programming.
The difficulty with the film, as you have seen in the trailer, is that despite the talents of Angelina Jolie, Sam Rockwell, Helen Mirren, Danny DeVito and others, it limits them to playing CGI animals of various shapes and sizes. The only recognizable performance of live action is Bryan Cranston, who does not hurt me, is a wonderfully talented actor with his own dedicated fanbase, but hardly anyone who can sell a big budget movie aimed at children.
Watch the One and Only Ivan trailer here
None of these actors, with the exception of Rockwell (who plays the titular gorilla Ivan, a role that would have been a decade ago after Owen Wilson), Cranston (the smarmy circus leader of Ivan) and DeVito (who a blabbermouth dog named Bob), have a lot to do. With a running time of about 90 minutes, The One and Only Ivan delivers just about a dozen lines each to their talented cast – I’m sure Jolie, who also serves as producer, packs her material in a day.
Do children care how famous the man as woman who speaks the serene elephant in the film is? Probably not. But her parents maybe.
Casting movie stars in animated films is a trend that began in the early 2000s, when Dreamworks, in an attempt to differentiate itself from Pixar, lured audiences with glamorous marketing campaigns featuring some of the biggest names. Which is exactly the strategy used in this movie. It now remains as distracting as ever.
The One and Only Ivan is an unusually pensive Disney movie – one that is thematically closer to Christopher Robin and Pete’s Dragon than, say, Aladdin or The Jungle Book. Writer Mike White and director Thea Sharrock slather the film with a layer of melancholy that is perhaps too intense for children.
Ivan, who was once the star of the show, finds that he no longer has the desire to do daily shows at a strip mall. All he wants to do is be at peace with retirement. I did not expect this movie to remind me of The Irishman, another movie in which a character dedicated to her job is struck by mortality, but there you have it. In scene after scene, Ivan sits in silence, steadfast in a mix of regret – not living a life – but also hoping to go out on his own terms. Rockwell is excellent, despite being heavily hampered by yourself and zeros.
This image released by Disney Plus shows Ivan the gorilla, expressed by Sam Rockwell, left, and Bob the dog, released by Danny DeVito, in a scene from The One and Only Ivan. (AP)
Like other Disney + live action and CGI hybrid Lady and the Tramp, The One and Only Ivan has wonderful visual works. The animals, especially Ivan, are breathtakingly realized. Their expressions are not as animated as they would have been in a movie before filming – remember the almost human-like faces of the beasts in Andy Serkis’ Planet of the Apes films and Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle – but neither does the film resembles National Geographic documents.
Along with his astonishingly dark parallels to slavery – Ivan was transferred from Africa to America, and spent nearly 30 years dancing to the sounds of a white man – the computer-generated effects of the film are his highlights. They would have looked brilliant on the big screen.
Also read: Hamilton movie review: Disney + Hotstar gives you a seat for the front row for history; do not spoil it
Filmmaker Nia DaCosta – days before news broke about her work with Disney on Captain Marvel 2 – speculated that Mulan director Niki Caro was a woman who had something to do with the studio’s decision to release the film on streaming. I wonder if there was similar reasoning to put this movie online as well. There is no way to know. The One and Only Ivan may be a little dirty for quarantined children, especially if they are expecting a bright movie about talking animals, but it is certainly not as unusual as the game they normally consume.
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The author tweets @RohanNaahar
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