Illumination and Universal Pictures
What does Illumination, one of the past decade’s most financially lucrative producers of big-studio animation, do when left to its own devices? The company’s last six features have all either been sequels or adaptations of already-famous characters, and the super-smash success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie from earlier this year assures that this will continue to be a part of the business plan. (Coming next summer: Despicable Me 4.) Migration (in theaters Dec. 22) breaks from that pattern, but only sort of: It’s a complete Illumination original, which in this context means that it shamelessly knocks off a Pixar movie.
The movie in question is Finding Nemo, to which Illumination appends their own form of Pixar’s fabled “plussing” style of feedback by removing key elements: What if Nemo’s mom didn’t die, and then he didn’t get separated from his family, and they all got lost together, and they were only really in mortal danger for five or 10 minutes? (Maybe Illumination can internally brand it “minusing:” less story, less effort!) You might say that plot description doesn’t sound much like Finding Nemo at all, and it is admittedly kind of amazing how Migration is able to retain the soul of a ripoff even as it jettisons many of the signature elements of the film it’s ripping off.
The connection to Nemo is Mack Mallard (Kumail Nanjiani), the nervous patriarch of a duck family, and his eagerness to keep his children, Dax (Caspar Jennings) and Gwen (Tresi Gazal), safe from any and all dangers of the world outside their pond. But the kids’ mom, Pam (Elizabeth Banks), yearns for a change, so when she meets another flock making its way to Jamaica for the winter, she convinces Mack to embark upon the same trip despite their lack of navigational know-how. (How a family of ducks has apparently managed to avoid the concept of migration for this many years is not entirely explained.)