Review of Mars Needs Moms (2011) by Dalton G — 21 Oct 2011

"Mars Needs Moms" is an animated film with its heart in the right place, while everything else is strewn all across the board like Scrabble pieces on a desktop. On one hand, it has the trite and true message directed at young children about appreciating your family, namely the important role that mothers play. However, this potentially touching moral is bogged down under the weight of all the sci-fi action and its harsh futuristic aesthetic. There is just not enough joy or whimsy to lighten the load of its shortcomings, save for one or two brief moments of sincere humanity dealing with the bond between mother and child. Said scenes might have fit better in a superior animated adventure.

After making some hurtful comments toward his hardworking mother (Joan Cusack), a young redheaded boy named Milo (Seth Dusky, mo-cap by Seth Green) gets up in the middle of the night just in time to observe an alien spaceship that is kidnapping her. After becoming an unexpected stowaway on the ship, he soon finds himself on the planet Mars, where his mother is being held prisoner for some kind of Martian experimentation.

As it turns out, Mars has a screwed up familial system. After realizing that adult Martians are completely useless, all of them are dumped in the trash chute and forced to live in a fiery pit of garbage underground not all that different from the dump in "Toy Story 3," only it doesn't make everyone cry buckets of tears. The female Martians are not Neanderthals like the men, but clearly lack the motherly touch and cannot raise their young, which are born from the planet's soil (don't ask). Under the control of a Martian matriarch known simply as the Supervisor (Mindy Sterling), one mom is pulled from earth every generation or so based on her abilities to nurture and assert her authority. The chosen mother has her memories extracted from her brain and essentially becomes incinerated, while the Martians use the stolen memories to program Nannybots to bring up the Martian children. Confused yet?

So with the help of the only other kindred spirit on Mars, a pudgy, aging yet eternally youthful techno-geek named Gribble (Dan Fogler), and the friendly Martian Ki (Elisabeth Harnois) who is fascinated by earthling hippie culture, Milo embarks on a mission to save his mother within a short period of time.

Legendary film innovator Robert Zemeckis (director of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," "Back To The Future" and "Forrest Gump") acts as producer on this project and brings along his fancy motion capture performance technology made famous in animated films such as "The Polar Express," "Beowulf" and "A Christmas Carol." This is where actors literally act out the whole film on a set, while their movements and expressions are carried over into the computer animation process. While this advancement is intended to bridge the gap between cartoon and live-action, the end result always arrives somewhere in the uncanny valley. Something about the characters just doesn't look right. Sure, they are detailed right down to every meticulous freckle on their face, but their awkward facial expressions and mouth movements look like a cut scene straight from of a Gamecube game.

The end credits show some video clips as these actors act everything out in their mo-cap suits and interact with both the cast and crew. As entertaining as it is to observe hefty Dan Fogler swinging across the set on a suspended bar of some kind, I began to wonder why the filmmakers made all this effort if the animators were just going to write over everything. It seems like a roundabout way of getting the job done. I might have been more interested to see a fully live-action adaptation of "Mars Needs Moms," but even then, I might not have been too impressed.

2/4.