Rent UglyDolls (2019)

UglyDolls review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

I found myself so bored with the mundanity of UglyDolls that I began peeling back its many layers of fluff and song to find perhaps an interesting allegory in all of this nonsense. To my surprise, there was some potential here with a story could’ve touched on so much. What ended up being a bland batch of simplistic animation and routine songs could have been a film that better-tackled individuality, racism, eugenics, and spirituality. Do those topics seem too grand for a kid’s movie? Perhaps but there’s so little to work with here I doubt any of it’ll sink in.

Consider the conception of the distinction between the ugly dolls and the regular ones. Born from a factory of unseen force, dolls are sorted into those that are proper and those that don’t fit the mold. The proper ones are pushed through the factory line to the Institute of Perfection, where dolls under go the ultimate test of looks and durability to be considered worthy of toy status for a kid. The ugly ones are tossed down a tube that has been diverted from the furance to UglyVille, a felt paradise of mistmatched and wacky characters.

I’d like to believe the dolls were rejected more for their dull silliness. Moxy (Kelly Clarkson) is the typical cute and curious girl who hopes that one day she’ll be considered a real toy, bursting with so much saccarine that I wouldn’t be surprised if she was composed of run-off from a long list of eccentric animated girls from other films. She wants to know where UglyDolls come from and ventures out of her home with a handful of trope-meeting companions to discover the Institute of Perfection.

And the institute is about as tiresomely tidy as one might expect for being the opposite of the abstractly assembled UglyDolls. All the dolls of the institute are of a familiar design with thin bodies and big heads, taking cues from the likes of Bratz and LOL Dolls, though maybe not as absurd. Here’s where the logic of the world gets twisty. In order to be accepted as a toy for a child, a doll must graduate from the institute and then enter a portal that supposedly transfers your sentience into the real world (I think). Who enforces these rules? Robots, apparently. But since the film needs a villain with more personality, there’s the pretty-boy Lou (Nick Jonas) acting as the principal of this supposed school of toy manners.

You can pretty much piece the film’s core story together from there. UglyDolls want to be accepted as toys but the institute won’t allow it, revealing a deeper and darker secret of the institute. All will be resolved by individuality and love, sure, but to what degree? Genuine? Certainly not. There’s no time to weave a clever tale on the more intriguing level of a Pixar fantasy. Not when there are original and forgettable songs to sing and lukewarm gags to pull off.

It’s truly a shame. Seriously. There’s a bigger story at play here with aspects of eugenics and racism, especially when the proper doll Mandy (Janelle Monáe) happens to be black and with glasses but isn’t considered acceptable unless she hides her bifocals. But because the film refuses to dig a little deeper into its more interesting aspects, held back perhaps by targeting of an even younger audience, UglyDolls carries a bitterness for never being more interesting past the potential more unique in theory than what’s up on the screen.