Vivo (2021, New Animated Musical With Songs By Your Hamilton Fella)

[Small Man Big Horse]

An animated musical with songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda, who also stars as the titular singing and instrument playing monkey, though only the audience can understand him, everyone in the movie just hears him making monkey noises. At the start of the movie Vivo performs songs with old man Andres (Juan de Marcos González) on the streets of Havana, and their life is one sexy romp until Andres' ex-girlfriend gets in touch and asks him to travel to see her perform in Miami and he plans to go and take her a song he wrote for her but never sang. But on no, Andres dies, and this highlights how different it is to Pixar at their best as it's hard to really care about the man's demise, and I'm normally easily manipulated by this kind of fare. Vivo of course then takes on Andres mission and teams up with his niece Gabi (Ynairaly Simo) to head to Florida and then Miami in this odd couple road trip affair which weirdly spends a fair chunk of the movie in the Florida Everglades where what appears to be the biggest snake to ever have existed (Michael Rooker) tries to eat them, and it's never a good thing when you kind of hope he succeeds. I'm a big fan of Hamilton and really liked In The Heights as well but the songs are fairly average, there's a couple of memorable numbers (all involving Gabi) but too many of them are the kind of thing you've heard before from Miranda and the big final supposedly amazing number is extremely disappointing and bland. Throughout the film the emotional beats feel forced and manipulative and due to that they rarely made me feel anything other than bored, I'm normally a sucker for this sort of thing but despite the odd impressive visual and funny joke it left me cold for at least half the running time, and worst of all is the fact that also applied to the ending. 5.3/10