The Mitchells vs the Machines review: A funny and self-aware adventure in the mould of Into the Spider-Verse

Dir: Mike Rianda. Starring: Abbi Jacobson, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Eric Andre, Fred Armisen, Beck Bennett, Conan O’Brien. Cert PG, 113 mins

It might feel a little audacious for an animated film produced by Sony Pictures and distributed by Netflix to preach about the dangers of too much screentime. Rick Mitchell (Danny McBride) sits at the breakfast table, hoping for a little confab with his beloved family, only to find them all slack-jawed and zombie-eyed, fixated on their devices. But The Mitchells vs the Machines, a family adventure from the producers of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, is far too sharp, funny, and self-aware to just wag its finger at audiences. Rick’s own frustrations are just one part of a wider generational divide. We see him sweat buckets as he tries to log in to YouTube, while his daughter Katie (Abbi Jacobson), an aspiring filmmaker, finds in the internet both a creative outlet and a tool to better understand herself.

That basic tension remains, even as the Mitchells are plunged into the middle of a robopocalypse, after a tech bro (Eric Andre) angers his own Alexa-like invention (Olivia Colman, wonderful and murderous) by discarding it for a new model. It retaliates by attempting to eject the entire human population into space. Somehow, it’s down to the Mitchells to save the day.

The Mitchells vs the Machines offers much of what we’ve come to expect from the producing team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, to the point that they’ve managed to cultivate a signature style. Here, the way the film’s 3D animation invokes hand-drawn imperfections is inherited from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The use of chaotic collage effects that nod to early 2000s internet videos, where kitten heads explode into lasers, were already present in 21 Jump Street. And the film’s cine-literate jokes fall in line with the LEGO Movie franchise – one scene involving vicious, Ewok-like Furbies is bound to stick around in pop culture until the end of the year. The Mitchells’ loaf-like dog, whose grunts are kindly provided by celebra-pup Doug the Pug, is equally primed to become a viral sensation.

But that’s not to say the voices of director Mike Rianda and his co-writer Jeff Rowe have simply been absorbed into some larger, cultural behemoth. They’ve put great care into crafting these characters, especially when it comes to the relationship between Rick and Katie – it’s still quite rare for mainstream cinema to celebrate, at its core, a loving father-daughter bond.

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And while the Mitchells have the familiar family dynamic of a goofy, adventurous father and a more practical mother (Maya Rudolph’s Linda), the latter isn’t robbed of her humour and wit, thanks mostly to Rudolph’s sweet, dorky performance. She’s upstaged only by the film’s most relatable character, her son Aaron (voiced by Rianda himself). He spends his days flipping through the phonebook until he can find someone to talk to him about dinosaurs.

The Mitchells might be dysfunctional, and the film even touches on how social media aggravates our personal jealousies, thanks to their yoga-loving neighbours voiced by John Legend and Chrissy Teigen. But, in the end, Rianda’s film preaches that the strongest families are simply those that see and listen to each other – app notifications be damned.