Playmobil: The Movie is a 2019 animated musical adventure film based on the German toy Playmobil. The film was directed by Lino DiSalvo (in his feature directorial debut) and written by Blaise Hemingway and the writing team of Greg Erb and Jason Oremland from an original story by DiSalvo. Featuring the voices of Anya Taylor-Joy, Jim Gaffigan, Gabriel Bateman, Adam Lambert, Kenan Thompson, Meghan Trainor, and Daniel Radcliffe, the plot follows a girl who tries to save her brother from a Playmobil world that the two are sucked into and becomes involved in the midst of a population-capturing scheme by Emperor Maximus.
Playmobil: The Movie premiered at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival on 10 June 2019, and was released in France on 7 August, in the United Kingdom on 9 August, and in the United States on 6 December. The film was panned by critics for being a perceived feature-length advertisement, with most criticisms directed to its poor storytelling, musical numbers, characters, tone, and worldbuilding problems, with several unfavourable comparisons to The Lego Movie (2014), although some praise focused on its animation and voice acting. The film was also a commercial failure, grossing only $16.3 million on a $40–75 million budget, with the worst opening weekend ever in the United States for a film playing in over 2,300 theaters.
Plot
Marla is a formerly free-spirited girl who has grown up to be responsible yet overprotective in caring for her brother, Charlie. Charlie has grown lonely and disconnected from her after their parents died in a car accident. One night, Charlie sneaks out to visit a toy museum with a Playmobil exhibit. After Marla arrives and tells Charlie off for running away, a lighthouse illuminates them and transports them to the Playmobil world.
Marla and Charlie–who has been transformed into a Viking warrior–find themselves in the middle of a Viking battle, and Charlie helps them until he is kidnapped by a group of pirates after accidentally stepping on a catapult. Frantic to find her brother, Marla goes to the nearest town hoping to ask for help and runs into Del, the driver of a food truck whose client refuses to pay him over pink hay that causes the town's horses to sprout wings. As Marla tries to form a posse to find Charlie, Del gets her out of trouble when she shows Viking gold to the whole town and agrees to help Marla find her brother in exchange for the gold.
Marla and Del run into Rex Dasher, a secret agent and an old friend of Del. Rex explains that several characters have disappeared, and the group sneaks into a villainous spy headquarters to find information about the disappearances. Despite some issues, they successfully gather the data and escape, but the pirates later capture Rex. He is taken to Constantinopolis and finds Charlie, who had been locked up with other characters by Emperor Maximus, who intends to have the prisoners fight to their deaths. Rex tells Charlie that Marla has been looking for him, which encourages Charlie to break away. However, he later allows himself to be recaptured, so the other characters can escape.
Del recognizes that a device used by the pirates belongs to Glinara, an alien crime lord. After meeting with her in exchange for information, Del offers to pay twice as much as he owes her. Glinara agrees and reveals that she sold the device to Maximus. However, Del cannot uphold his end of the bargain, as Marla only has two pieces of gold left. Angered, Glinara captures them and attempts to drop them into a portal, but they are spared by Glinara's robot servant, Robotitron, who hacks the portal and drops the group into a forest. Del leaves the group, upset by Marla's deception. Marla and Robotitron get lost in the forest until Marla accidentally hits a fairy godmother, who encourages her to continue her search and sends her to Constantinopolis.
Arriving in the city, Marla reaches a coliseum where Charlie is about to fight a Tyrannosaurus rex. Charlie and Marla work together to fight off the T-Rex but to no avail. Del soon arrives with his food truck, and Marla uses the last of Del's pink hay to turn the T-Rex harmless. An enraged Maximus orders his guards to arrest them, but the guards reveal themselves as Rex and the missing warriors, who lock Maximus inside a cage. As everyone celebrates their victory, Marla and Charlie use the T-Rex to fly back to the lighthouse and return to the real world, where it is revealed that they were missing for only five minutes. On good terms, Marla promises Charlie that their relationship will be mended.
Cast Anya Taylor-Joy as Marla Brenner, Charlie's older sister, who also voices Marla's Playmobil form. Director Lino DiSalvo cast Taylor-Joy for the "texture" of her voice, and described her performance as "believable and emotional" Gabriel Bateman as Charlie Brenner, Marla's younger brother, who also voices Charlie's Playmobil Viking form. As DiSalvo explains, "when I met Gabriel, I totally saw a kid that Spielberg would cast" Ryan S. Hill plays a 6-year-old Charlie Jim Gaffigan as Del, a food truck driver who supports himself with several side jobs and is Marla's best friend Daniel Radcliffe as Rex Dasher, a secret agent who helps Marla. While normally reluctant to play spy roles in films, Radcliffe accepted the part of Dasher because "there is something incredibly fun about playing an unbelievably confident, kind of to the point of being an oblivious, person who is constantly undercut by other characters who make him realise that maybe he's not as smooth as he thinks he is" Adam Lambert as Emperor Maximus, the tyrannical ruler of Constatinopolis. Lambert explained that he played the character as himself "on a really bad day" Kenan Thompson as Bloodbones, a pirate captain. In addition to the role's Broadway-level singing demands, the nasally-voiced Thompson also had to perform his lines in a guttural tone, which gave him a "headache" Meghan Trainor as The Fairy Godmother, a fairy godmother who Marla encounters in a forest. It was Trainor's childhood dream to play a fairy character, but also a very difficult task: "I've never smiled so hard in my life to make this girl happy and I was jumping up and down." Trainor's involvement in Playmobil: The Movie began while writing "Run Like The River" for her album Treat Myself. "I remember meeting someone who was like, this should be in the movie," explained Trainor; and a week later, she presented the song to DiSalvo: "It looked like it blew his mind" Lino DiSalvo as Robotitron, a robot who works for Glinara Maddie Taylor as Glinara, an alien crime lord Kirk Thornton as Ook Ook, a caveman Dan Navarro as Viking Leader Cindy Robinson as Nola, an alien bounty hunter Paloma Rodriguez as Valera, an Amazon warrior Spike Spencer as additional voices Benjamin Diskin as Seadog Kellen Goff as Salty Dino Andrade as Scurvy Pete Karen Strassman as Dr. Greta Grim
Production Development
An animated feature film based on the Playmobil toyline was first announced in November 2014 with an originally expected release at the end of 2017, set to be produced and animated by the French company ON Entertainment through its Montreal-based studio, ON Animation Studios, with Pathé handling distribution in France and Wild Bunch handling international sales. The toy's film rights were secured by ON Entertainment and its producers Dimitri Rassam and Aton Soumache, with Bob Persichetti originally set to write and direct. By October 2015, the film had a reported budget of $75 million, with US distribution rights initially acquired by Cross Creek Pictures. Persichetti initially pitched the film to Sony Pictures Animation, which attempted to buy the pitch before it fell through. He was eventually offered instead to direct the 2018 superhero film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
On 9 February 2016, Lino DiSalvo, who previously worked as an animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios for 17 years, came on board as director, replacing Persichetti. This film marks DiSalvo's directorial debut, with Blaise Hemingway set to write the screenplay, Alexis Vonarb, Axel Von Maydell, and Moritz Borman also producing the film, and US distribution rights being transferred to Open Road Films by 12 May 2016. Maydell was first associated with the Playmobil brand fifteen years before the film's release, when he was involved in producing interactive games for the company.
On 17 November 2017, it was reported that Wendi McLendon-Covey would star in the film. In June 2018, the film's production was underway and some details of the film were revealed, during a session at Annecy International Animated Film Festival. In October 2018, lead voice cast was announced which included Anya Taylor-Joy, Gabriel Bateman, Daniel Radcliffe, Jim Gaffigan, Meghan Trainor, and Adam Lambert.
Writing DiSalvo instantly got to work on animatics following Open Road's acquisition, completing five animatics in Los Angeles and Montreal before work on the assets began. The first 15 months of the film's production was spent in Los Angeles, with a crew of ten people. When the project moved to Montreal, 300 people ("more than half of the animation crew at a typical Disney movie") were involved. Both DiSalvo and Hemingway, long-time friends, re-watched their favorite 1980s films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) in writing Playmobil; Hemingway explained that both the movie and the old-school films they referenced knew "how to find what is magical in the most mundane situations."
The producers wanted to capture a child's emotion of playing with toys with Playmobil, which meant DiSalvo had to research. He interviewed more than 200 fans of Playmobil from across the globe, finding that the toy series was mostly enjoyed for its role play element, where "they don't tell you who the hero is — the player defines who the hero is." Thus, he went for a role-playing vibe in writing the film's story. DiSalvo also revisited his childhood home to look at the toys he played with as a kid. The German Playmobil company also sent every Playmobil set ever released to the Los Angeles development location, and the writers used them to conceive characters. A food truck and a figure wearing a Hawaiian shirt, for instance, led to the creation of Del.
Initially, the writers planned Playmobil: The Movie to start with either a shot of an opening storybook or a narration, similar to most fairy tale movies. These ideas were rejected due to not being "organic" enough for the overall product. They finally chose to have opening and closing live-action sequences: "Marla, has lost touch with the child's point of view that she used to have. It felt right to show her in a live-action world where there is no magic. When she finds herself in a very magical situation — which is the entrance to the world of Playmobil, it becomes the catalyst for the whole movie."
Animation Playmobil: The Movie was animated with Autodesk Maya,Ringard & Levastre, p. 2. with Julien Bocabeille supervising the film's animation team, which consisted of 56 animators. Being that Playmobil: the Movie was a story about wish fulfillment, the scale was one of the biggest priorities. According to production designer Rémi Salmon: "We see those toys from a kid's eyes, not what he has in front of him but what he imagines. The pirate in his hand has a stiff plastic cape, but when he plays, he sees the cape floating in the wind." The animators' biggest challenges came in the set designs and character animation. While each Playmobil universe varied in tone and lighting due to their differing styles, they had to have some consistencies with the Playmobil world. The Fifth Element and the works of J. J. Abrams were influences in designing the city of Glinara.