Look beyond the gleaming surface of children’s animation Luck and a clash of titans comes into view. The film is released by Apple in a face-off with Pixar, the animation studio once owned by Steve Jobs, before he sold it to Disney. An Apple vs Disney death-match has long looked one likely endgame for the streaming era. If so, take Luck as a taster, played out in the form of a school holiday time-killer full of cartoon leprechauns.
The movie has an essential weirdness that is flagged from the start as chipper, newly 18-year-old Sam (voiced by Eva Noblezada) leaves the children’s home where she has grown up. A lonely childhood spent without parents is, we learn, down to the sheer “bad luck” the movie seeks to remedy. The solution comes in the Land of Luck, an Oz-like world brought to life with a baroque flash. Grandiose set design is the backdrop for a frankly tangled social order. (To précis, heavily: lucky pennies are manufactured, overseen by suited pigs. The effect is less Orwellian than it sounds.)
If the splashy spectacle is meant to outdazzle Pixar, this isn’t where director Peggy Holmes does her best work. A simple early sequence in which a black cat breezes through a cityscape — along the tops of massed umbrellas — is elegant, brilliant and over too soon. More improbability follows. The cat turns out to talk (voiced by Simon Pegg) in a Scottish accent not nearly as odd as the human aspect of its face when it does. The sight may trouble younger viewers (and some older ones too).
One final caveat: the film was produced by John Lasseter, former creative engine of Pixar and Disney, who left both companies in 2019 after admitting “missteps” amid allegations of sexual misconduct. You may choose to pause for thought before hitting Play.
★★★☆☆
In cinemas and on Apple TV Plus from August 5
