'Abominable' Review—Wonderfully Charming

After I watched this movie, I realized that this is the 500th movie I’ve watched in my lifetime. Pretty big milestone. Anyways, it’s review time!

Here we go!

Abominable is an animated adventure film written and directed by Jill Culton. The film follows Yi, a teenage girl who discovers a Yeti named Everest, and decides to go on an adventure with him and a few friends to bring Everest back to his home in Mount Everest.

I went into this movie with low expectations. I was worried about this film just being another very childish animated film with a lot of familiar tropes, and what I’ve realized is that even though I was kind of right about my presumptions, I still loved it.

The story this movie tells is beautiful. I found it to be very wonderfully told and I love the way the characters such as Yi were developed. She is going through an internal struggle and she’s grown distant from her family, and the film did a great job of showing that to the audience.

It also does a good job of developing its two supporting characters, Jin and Peng. They are given a lot of personality and life, making them very entertaining to watch.

I also loved the animation. The cinematography in this film is dazzling to the eye, and there are sequences that look absolutely wonderful. The landscapes are aesthetically incredible, and while the film doesn’t quite reach the realistic animation of Pixar, it remained a great film to watch.

And I also loved the way the film incorporated violin music into the plot. Yi has a very personal connection with her violin, and you can see throughout the film how much she cares for playing the instrument. It showed the beauty of music and the effect that it can have on people.

Let’s talk abut the cast of this movie; they all do a great job with their voice performances and they show a lot of emotions in their performances. I also love how they cast Asian actors to portray Asian characters. This is the first animated movie I’ve seen with Asians as the lead characters, and I like what this film is doing for Asian representation.

The adventure is also consistently interesting. There are a good amount of action sequences throughout that are all very entertaining and fun to watch. Because our heroes are on the run from mercenaries after Everest, the film is essentially a game of cat-and-mouse all wrapped up inside of a fun adventure which I really enjoyed.

In terms of issues with this film, they’re mostly what I feared before walking into this movie. This film can basically be renamed How to Train Your Yeti or The Yeti Giant, given the similarities it has to a bunch of children’s films that have come out already.

This movie is a little bit Iron Giant, a little bit How to Train Your Dragon, a little bit Lilo & Stitch, and a little bit that scene from Monsters, Inc. when Mike and Sully run into the Abominable Snowman.

And because of the familiarity with the plot, this movie is very predictable in terms of the events that happen, and I saw a lot of the plot points coming. Additionally, the climax of the film is a bit too fast. It lasts for about five minutes, and it seemed a bit rushed.

I would have preferred more suspense and tension in the big finale of the movie, but it doesn’t last for too long. I didn’t appreciate it very much because I prefer when my climaxes take a longer amount of time instead of being too short because then I don’t have enough time to enjoy myself before it ends.

Where was I? Anyways, this movie was overall pretty fun to watch. It’s well-animated, the characters are well-developed, and while it’s not the most original movie in the world, it’s good enough fun for the whole family and I recommend it.

I’m gonna give Abominable an 8/10 (B).

PSA: if your kid is loud and annoying, don’t bring them to the theater. It just annoys the passionate grown-up cinema lovers like me who go to theaters and watch children’s movies by themselves which is OBVIOUSLY the target demographic of this movie.