Tangles, 2026.
Directed by Leah Nelson.
Starring Julia Louis Dreyfuss, Abbi Jacobson, Bryan Cranston, Beanie Feldstein, Seth Rogen, Samira Wiley, Pamela Adlon, Sarah Silverman, Bowen Yang, and Wanda Sykes.
SYNOPSIS:
Sarah leaves her exciting life as an activist and artist in 90s San Francisco to return to the small, conservative hometown she fled when Alzheimer’s begins to erode her mother’s vibrant personality.
I really enjoyed Point Grey’s first animated movie Sausage Party. A funny film that pushed the envelope of good taste and risky humour against the typified Disney-3D space. Their second animated effort Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mutant Mayhem I also liked but was less funny and followed in the footsteps of Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse success with a more etched 2.5D style, and a stylized “chopped” frame rate (12 frames a second compared to the standard 24 frames in film). With Tangles, their first Canadian animated effort they come further down to earth with a full 2D only style rendered in black and white but in that same ugly choppy style. I did not like it.
Tangles is not a beautiful film. Apart from the brief imagination-driven opening sequence where a mother named Midge (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) scares away the monsters off the wallpaper in her young daughter Sarah’s bedroom (Abbi Jacobson), and a nightmare ready scene at a Dia de la Muertos festival, the story scarcely makes an argument for its use in the animated medium. Worse its mostly a conventional melodrama. Its black & white style and cheap shading lacks the detail and attitude of a Disney storyboard and doesn’t stand out anymore than a web comic. Paperman, this is not.
Presumably it mimics the style of the comic book it is adapting from Canadian author Sarah Leavitt. But despite the Canadian financing, director (Sarah Nelson), producer Seth Rogen (who also voices), and original author and story all belonging to Vancouver (Point Grey is a neighbourhood there), the film is set in America between San Francisco & Maine. To drop such inherent cultural specificity in a fairly conventional melodrama by a team such as this, even for Canada which usually subs in for America feels like a new low, especially at a time like this.
The film takes place from 1999-2002 yet utilizes the setting mostly as window dressing, a lot of the background detail in the film feels overly broad. It reminded me of the nostalgia bloated video game from this year Mixtape, that Point Grey’s Sausage Party collaborator Annapurna produced. The setting comes off as less sincere and personal and more lazily trendy.
A frustrating plot point in the film is that nobody in Midge’s family does a good job of taking care of her. Frequently making obvious mistakes like leaving her alone when plenty of attentive family members are around and you wait for something to go wrong. As valid as it is for Sarah to pursue a career and relationship as her home life is falling apart, her career as a cartoonist is mostly played for stale laughs and her relationship drama is so generic the conflict pales in comparison to her mother’s illness. If either of these had more depth it might be more compelling for Sarah as a protagonist. When a longstanding feud brews between her and her sister (Beanie Feldstein) in a parking lot, it feels so insignificant I wanted to scream at the screen that they shouldn’t leave their Mom in the diner. Other indistinguishably animated family members that show up in the film add nothing funny, dramatic or insightful to the plot. This would hold true for the work sections which feature Bowen Yang (a warning sign for any comedy) if they didn’t also feature Wanda Sykes whose voice work and A-grade lively delivery is perfectly suited to animation and had the audience laughing the most.
Story-wise, there is not enough of a buildup to who Midge is as a person to make you care more about her decline. Dreyfus does a wonderful job here, injecting her character with as much humanity as possible. Every line is felt and she exceeds the performances of rest of the cast by miles. Similar to her Marvel character and somewhat intertextually, she is desperate to be taken seriously and should be. Yet the screenplay does not grant her character the depth that she deserves. I am not expecting the filmmakers to make Michael Haneke’s Amour, but a project featuring Seth Rogen that didn’t feel half-assed and lean on his trademark wheeze to supply most of the laughs would be nice (he plays the sister’s son in law). All of the characters feel generic with the leading millennial character, as is too often painfully written, is plainly self-absorbed. Vancouver is a city that features tons of voice actors but I have to listen to Bryan Cranston play an aloof Disney dad. Maybe if some of the cast’s paychecks went to the animation department, the movie would be a more engaging watch.
What hurts it this time is the trademark Rogen crassness. There’s no effort to appeal to 21st-century kids who might watch and be introduced to the subject matter. None of the added language, nudity or sex scenes add to the material, with the last part an edgy attempt to make up for the lack of depth between Sarah and her girlfriend. I’m sure there’s an audience for those interested in low grade animation for salacious LGBTQ+ material, however given the detail present in that scene most of them probably worked on it.
There are few artistic story choices in the film that work. The bland Melissa Etheridge song Rogen’s character chooses to sing exemplifies the matter. Like modern millennial movie/TV language the song is ironically referred to as a “classic”, due more to its familiarity and less that it works. Tangles shows how adapting a compelling true story is not enough when, due to the difficulty of making films, it is undermined by phoney Hollywood sentimentality.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Will Hume
