Sketch is a cheering rarity: an original family film with real comic smarts, recalling the sundappled subversion of early Tim Burton and Joe Dante. (A more contemporary way of positioning it: as A Minecraft Movie with less money and more attitude.) Curiously, it's brought to us by Angel Studios, the evangelical Christian-aligned institution that previously gave the world the MAGA-targeting Sound of Freedom. Square that circle, if you can. (Does anything make sense on this planet any more?) Granted, the film centres on a Caucasian family unit, but it's a rather sorry, lopsided one, with sadsack single dad Tony Hale presiding over two maladjusted children: a daughter (Bianca Belle) whose quiet rage and self-reproach after the loss of her mother manifests in her incessant drawing, and a smart-ass son (Kue Lawrence) who's discovered an apparently magic lake and hit upon a crackpot plan to revive mom by dumping her ashes in it. Clearly, there are some issues here, and they redouble after the daughter's notebook - and not the urn with the ashes - gets tossed in the water, bringing a clutch of crudely drawn monsters and demons, manifestations of a troubled psyche, to towering and terrifying life. Parents and guardians note: it's a 12A.
It's also an example of a writer-director (Seth Worley, taking a giant leap forwards and a bow after a decade's worth of shorts) doing more with less: his modest resources have been well-channelled and maximised, and he arrives at a genuinely happy and fruitful marriage between the analogue and the digital. Sketch once more illustrates it's better to have a small number of VFX shots done well than a screenfilling splurge that clutters the eyeline and saps the technicians' time, resources and spirits. These monsters - being kids' drawings - aren't meant to look like much; what's most pleasing about them are the waxy smears and chalk dust they leave behind, the handiwork of a visually-minded director doodling over his own live-action footage (and perhaps of a parent who's had to clear up after especially prolific scribblers). Some penhand or human touch, in other words, persists. The casting, for one, is fab: from the off, the juvenile leads have an air of brattishness that persuades you they might well get up to no good (and makes you wonder anew how this project found favour with its Sunday-schooling studio). The grown-ups are no less memorable: Hale lands easily his most substantial role this side of Buster Bluth, legitimately weary as someone who finds this parenting lark hard, doubly so now that he's lost a life partner who had a far easier connection to their offspring, and the ever-welcome D'Arcy Carden is fun as his realtor sister, trying to smarten up and sell the family home while the plot grows ever more chaotic and unruly. Worley's own editing assists in that sense of a world veering out of control, while also keeping the film 92 minutes tight and redirecting our eyes towards some nice, Spielbergian detail. When the monsters crash the children's schoolbus in a cornfield, Worley inserts a shot of the guilty pencils, loosed from a dropped backpack; the finale hinges on our heroine having to find a felt-tip pen that actually works. Sketch has come out of nowhere and from an unlikely source - not least because the narrative resolutions it proposes are finally more psychoanalytical than pious - but if this doesn't land Worley a major studio gig in the next few years, I'll eat my Crayola. Just don't make him remake Disney cartoons with real people, that's all one asks.
Sketch is available on DVD through Spirit Entertainment, and to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.
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