Migration

The watercolor Soul in a Plastic World

There is a specific, quiet tragedy in watching a filmmaker with a delicate hand attempt to paint on a billboard. Benjamin Renner, the French director behind the exquisite, watercolor-washed *Ernest & Celestine* (2012) and the frantic but hand-crafted *The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales* (2017), has built a career on imperfection. His lines usually wobble with human energy; his backgrounds breathe with negative space. In *Migration* (2023), Renner steps into the polished, fluorescent machine of Illumination Entertainment—the studio that gave the world the Minions—and the result is a fascinating, if slightly compromised, experiment in texture.



The narrative premise is deceptively simple, almost fable-like. Mack (Kumail Nanjiani), an anxious mallard patriarch, holds his family hostage in a New England pond, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown. His wife Pam (Elizabeth Banks) and their children yearn for the wider world. When they finally depart for Jamaica, the film becomes a road movie of avian proportions. Yet, to view this merely as a "family comedy" is to miss the aesthetic war being waged in the frames. Renner tries to subvert the glossy, plasticine look typical of modern 3D animation. He brings a painterly softness to the New England autumn foliage and a misty, impressionistic terror to the fog-laden skylines of New York City. The film does not look like *Despicable Me*; it looks like a storybook attempting to survive in a video game engine.

The tension between the director’s soul and the studio’s mandate is most palpable in the film’s pacing. Renner’s previous work thrived on pauses—moments where characters simply existed. Illumination, conversely, abhors silence. Consequently, *Migration* often feels like it is sprinting past its own beauty. We are treated to a breathtaking sequence where the ducks fly above the clouds, a moment of pure, silent transcendence that rivals the best of Miyazaki, only for the scene to be quickly undercut by a necessary plot beat or a slapstick gag. It is as if the film is afraid that if it stops moving, the audience will remember they are watching art, not just entertainment.



Despite the kinetic frenzy, the screenplay by Mike White (*The White Lotus*) manages to inject a strain of neurosis that feels distinctively adult. Mack is not just a protective father; he is a portrait of modern anxiety, a creature so terrified of "content" and "engagement" with the world that he chooses stagnation. The antagonists here are not supervillains, but the indifferent cruelty of the culinary world—embodied by a silent, knife-wielding chef who hunts the ducks not with malice, but with professional efficiency. This shift from "good vs. evil" to "survival vs. consumption" gives the film a slight, welcome edge of darkness that recalls the grim fairy tales of old.

Ultimately, *Migration* is a film about the courage to leave one's pond, a meta-commentary on Renner’s own leap from the niche world of French animation to the global Hollywood stage. It is not a perfect landing; the commercial demands of the genre clip its wings just as it begins to soar. Yet, in its visual textures and its tender character dynamics, it offers something rare in the current landscape of animated blockbusters: a heartbeat beneath the feathers. It serves as a reminder that even within the industrial complex of major studio animation, the artist’s hand can still, occasionally, leave a smudge of truth.