Eleventy Base Blog v9

Jumbo Movie Review


Just finished watching an Indonesian original animated film, Jumbo, on its second day of screening, and I have some thoughts

Quick plot recap, Don, nicknamed Jumbo, is made fun of for his retelling of the same storybook his parents left him. He is then encouraged by his (actual) friends to sign up for a talent show to showcase his storytelling skills. Amidst this, the B-plot comtains the chieftain of the village and the plans to sell off land to build roads. In his journey to put on a good show, Jumbo meets a ghost-child seeking her parents who were taken away by a ghostbuster-esque villain. Jumbo wins the preliminaries, falls out with his friends in his hubris, breaks the promise he made to the ghost child, and discovers that the chieftain was the one distrubing graves and doing the ghostbusting. Jumbo has to "make amends" with his "friends" and save the day by exposing the chieftain for being the fraud that he is, reuniting the ghost child with her parents in the process. Timeskip a year later and he is popular with more friends and have accepted a more passive role in the spotlight but still is selfish.

Some early threads went unsolved while the stakes got increasingly more dire. The early parts of the film set up Jumbo to prove to this frenemies that he can win the talent contest and he will have friends that don't kick him out of games because he's fat and slow. This goes unchallenged as Jumbo does win the preliminaries and does get more friends after the 1-year timeskip. So, I guess winning competitions do make you more popular and well-liked?

On top of that, the whole land development aspect felt... dropped right around the climax? It became more about disturbing graves than actually selling off land owned by the locals. It doesn't say anything about land development other than graves and tombstones are immovable, eternal things which we must'nt disturb which... ok, is a widely held belief.

I say that Jumbo's motives are still selfish because after the timeskip we see him wielding the ghostbusting radio used by the chieftain to communicate with his dead parents (his parents died in a car crash trying to rush to get on the train). He says he regrets "not helping the ghost-child earlier because then the radio wouldn't be broken and he would be able to see [his parents]." Buddy. You're not really showcasing growth here buddy. He only thinks about himself and his dead parents. Which, I guess is fair for a kid to think about but man do the conflicts feel contrived because of his grating personality.

The two sidekicks and moral anchors of the story are much more compelling characters albeit more two-dimensional. I feel like they could've been consolidated into one character with more depth because I do feel like their role in the story becomes redundant to a point.

Initially, I thought I liked the story beats of the movie and just strongly disliked the protagonist, but then I came to realize the structure was somewhat all over the place. What does Jumbo want vs. what does he need? He wants to make (more) friends, but he needs to listen to his pre-existing friends. This in itself is fine albeit a bit grating. But he's a flawed main character so it's a take-it-or-leave-it situation, fine. But in the end, Jumbo does make more friends and we only see him listening to one (1) new main character! He "apologizes" to his other two besties and moral anchors, but we don't SEE him viewing them as people and we don't SEE him becoming more of an active listener is his friends' lives. We are just TOLD that he has grown within the year's timeskip instead of following along with his journey. The story that was supposed to be about him learning to become a better listener is put off until the resolution because the film was too preoccupied with the dead wife backstory!

Wow that's a lot of text. I have a lot of opinions on this film and I want them to do better. The animation is great, but the story and plot requires some help. I love animation as a medium and this isn't some scathing takedown, I want to like this movie, but it is frustratingly close to getting the right amount of action, plot, and character development. I wish we got to SEE more character development in such a character-driven story.