4/5
Review by John P. Harvey.
Jack (Kue Lawrence), Amber (Bianca Belle), and their dad, Taylor (Tony Hale), seem to be coping adequately with their grief over the loss of the children’s mother, Ally (Allie McCulloch). Taylor ill-advisedly tries to help his children through their grief by removing all reminders of their mother, including photographs of her. Amber, now denied images of her mother, turns her artistic talent to expressing her darker feelings by creating violent monsters on paper, an outlet that the school psychologist encourages.
And all seems well enough until the day those monsters are brought to larger-than-life — of which the first one that the children encounter, a blue blob on legs whom Amber named Dave, is bent on the children’s destruction. Only Amber and Jack have any clue how they may possibly, with unhelpful help from a fellow student, limit the damage.
In the service of enriching its viewers’ humanity, Sketch vaunts creative expression, strength of character, and courage over arbitrariness and conformity. The film is essentially a fairy tale about willingness to perceive the good and to use lighter thoughts and emotions to balance darker ones, and it illustrates, in the tradition of the best fairy tales, the importance of putting our highest values into action. It’s also funny.
As do many more traditional fairy tales, this new tale incorporates threats that become meaningful and immediate through frightful action. Jack is about 14, and Amber is about 13, and the film is pitched as family entertainment. In fact, despite the film’s great cinematography and animation, adult viewers will find the threatening nature of the come-to-life monsters ameliorated by the monsters’ obvious relationship to Amber’s sketches and art materials. Even so, the children convey their emotions with conviction; the realism of their fear and the destruction that we see the artistic monsters engage in succeeds well in conveying acute danger. The film may be pretty intense for young children.
Sketch abandons or overlooks several minor matters that at first seem significant, and the mechanism by which things such as drawings change is never fully rationalised. These technical faults hardly mar, though, what is, for all its intensity, essentially a fun ride.