Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken

Grade: B

Let’s go ahead and mention the element in the room. DreamWorks Animation hasn’t quite held a candle to Pixar, especially in the last few years, but they’ve had a few fairly enjoyable movies. I thought the Shreks were overrated, but I did like Chicken Run and Antz. I’ll put it to you this way: Elemental is a “bad” film for Pixar, and Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken – which is no Elemental – is one of DreamWorks’s better ones. If you’ve already seen the former, you could do a lot worse than check out the latter.

The Gillmans live in a town called Oceanside. They are krakens, trying their best to pose as normal humans (“If anyone asks, we’re Canadian.”) 15-year-old Ruby is just about to ask her crush to prom, when he falls into the water, and she ends up saving him from drowning – while also discovering her special gift, not to mention her family history, which contains a few surprises.

The voice talent includes Lana Condor (X-Men: Apocalypse), Toni Collette, and Jane Fonda as (respectively) Ruby, her mother, and her grandmother. Will Forte as a long-bearded, elderly pirate named Gordon Lighthouse has an amusing through-line where he never got over his ex-wife leaving him. Her name is Tammy. I don’t know why that’s funny, but it is.

There are twists upon twists. There’s a character who is bad, then turns out to be good (so we think), then we find out is “for real for real” bad, in a different way than their initial badness. And in their good period, they gave wise and sound advice. The plot is busy with backstories that feel overinflated, like there are too many unnecessary details.

At its best, though, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken packs an operative punch. The scenes underwater and the climactic fight look great. The colors are lovely. There’s heart here, and a sweet moral about unlikely forces burying pre-conceived hatchets and working together. It looks odd to see so many different beings getting along so famously by the end, but it’s nice to see it happen.

Grade: B