Luck, John Lasseter’s return to animation, feels like Pixar gone wrong

polygon.com:

During the 2000s heyday of Pixar Animation Studios, the studio’s releases seemed absolutely guaranteed to get rapturous reviews and muscular box office. Pixar’s long roster of successes, from the Toy Story movies to Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, and more, prompted plenty of profiles examining the company’s creative process, and its technique of “plussing” during story development, or offering positive suggestions and improvements for any elements that weren’t working, rather than negative critiques. It’s not unlike the ”yes and” technique seen in improv: A finished product built through plussing might not much resemble the original idea, but it will be built out from that idea, without the creative team getting distracted by second-guessing elements and tearing down their own work.

Luck, the inaugural feature film from Skydance Animation — and the first film produced by former Disney/Pixar animation head John Lasseter since the company ousted him over sexual harassment complaints — feels like plussing run amok. It’s a movie where uninspired ideas become the building blocks for more uninspired ideas, until the filmmakers have constructed an elaborate shrine to their own whimsical lore. This is a movie that whisks its perpetually unlucky heroine, Sam (Eva Noblezada), into a magical land of luck, a place crowded with leprechauns and various animals considered lucky across different cultures. But it doesn’t stop there; those animals are also deeply invested in the creation of magic luck dust. And also the preservation of magic luck rocks. And they’re powered by magic lucky pennies. Also, there’s a dragon voiced by Jane Fonda.

Despite all this magical bric-a-brac, Luck isn’t an especially magical experience. It