'Sketch' draws from the spirit of '80s kids' classics
Doodles come to life in Seth Worley's fantasy-action-comedy.
Every artist has their signature motif. Magritte had his faceless men in bowler hats. Warhol had his soup cans. And Amber has her long-legged, googly-eyed monsters.
It’s fine, even healthy when Amber (Bianca Belle) furiously scribbles those monsters in her notebook as a way of processing her turbulent emotions. It’s when those creatures literally leap off the page that spell trouble in “Sketch,” writer-director Seth Worley’s colorful and inventive kid-friendly adventure that attempts to update a Joe Dante movie with today’s more sophisticated emotional language.
Amber has a lot to process, having lost her mother (from whom she apparently got her artistic bent) not long before. Her father, Taylor (Tony Hale of “Veep”) is just barely holding it together, thinking the best way to help his kids through their grief is to push it away, taking their mother’s pictures off the walls and never talking about her. Amber’s brother Jack (Kue Lawrence) is likewise convinced he can “fix” things to become like they were.
Jack’s urge to “fix” comes into play when he discovers a mysterious inky blue pond near their property that apparently has healing properties, able to mend a broken plate good as new. Maybe he can make their family whole again too? But then Jack accidentally drops Amber’s sketchbook into the pond, and her Crayola creatures come to life and start roaming the countryside.
The creature design in “Sketch” is really fun, including little orange eyeball spiders called, obviously, “eyeders,” a troll-like creature that sounds like a car alarm to alert other monsters of prey, and blank sinewy creatures that look like pencil scribbles come to life.
Worley’s North Star is clearly kids’ movies of the 1980s, particularly “Gremlins” and “The Goonies.” “Sketch” is bright and funny and it moves, deploying tricks like whip-pans and sudden reveals, and Worley (who also edited the film) sometimes cuts a line of dialogue off before the last word, jumping to another scene to keep the momentum going.
Sometimes I felt the film was going a little too fast. I would have appreciated a little more time to build a little suspense, to set the table before the monsters flipped it over. But then I remembered “Sketch” is designed for eyes much younger than mine.
The monsters are more silly than scary, although there are a couple of scenes, such as when a sleepy blue behemoth named Dave menaces a school bus full of kids, that might be too intense for very young viewers. There’s also lots of humor, especially when Jack and Amber join up with a wisecracking classmate, Bowman (Kalon Cox) who gets most of the best lines. He may be the Chunk of his generation.
On the other side of the generation divide, the adult performances in “Sketch” are really strong. Hale might seem like an unlikely choice to play a dad, but he really conveys Taylor’s exhausted love for his kids and his fear that he can’t help them through an impossible trauma. Hale, of course, also has great low-key comic timing when Taylor faces monsters large and small. D’Arcy Carden of “The Good Place” is also very funny as Taylor’s sister, perfectly underplaying her reaction shots to the colorful carnage around her.
“Sketch” is a much better-executed version of previous family films like “IF” or “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” whose attempts at childlike whimsy felt artificial and forced. “Sketch” feels like the action, humor and heart are all flowing effortlessly from the same place, and Worley expresses his vision with the same enthusiasm and excitement of a child running up to you with a piece of paper, shouting “Look what I made!”
“Sketch” opens Wednesday in theaters. In Madison, it will play at Marcus Point, Marcus Palace, AMC Fitchburg 18 and Flix Brewhouse Madison.