Lost Ollie
Created by Shannon Tindle
Based on Ollie’s Odyssey
by William Joyce
Directed by Peter Ramsey
Starring Gina Rodriguez, Jake Johnson, Kesler Talbot
Voices of Jonathan Groff, Mary J. Blige, Tim Blake Nelson
Narrated by Jonathan Groff
An animated toy is separated from his human companion, and begins a quest to find the child. In his quest he is joined by two other toys. If this sounds derivative, remember the nature of the Mouse. Ollie and friends would have been sued into a radioactive ruin if there really was that much of a resemblance.
Lost Ollie is considerably darker and sharper-edged than the Toy Story series. A glance at the pedigree shows the immense talent behind the series: Peter Ramsey (“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”) and creator Shannon Tindle (“Kubo and the Two Strings”). The story is based on Ollie’s Odyssey by William Joyce. Joyce designed the characters and laid out the basic concepts for Toy Story. Some of the greatest animated films involved these three artists, and it shows here.
The main toy character is Ollie (Groff), a stuffed patchwork toy with rabbit ears. He’s the instigator behind the quest, a wide-eyed naif who is using clues from a crude map to reassemble his memory in order to find his companion. He is joined by Zozo (Nelson), a hybrid TV preacher/Elvis type, and Rosy (Blige), a pink bunny toy who wields a cocktail spear as a samurai sword and is the resident bad-ass of the group.
The live-action humans are Billy (Talbot), who is 8 or 10 or so, his parents, and incidental roles from other children and adults in his Kentucky community.
As the quest nears an end, it turns out that Zozo has his own agenda, one that is curiously linked to that of Ollie’s.
The CGI animation of the stuffed toys is breathtakingly good. The three toys have five eyes among them, all made of glass, and only one has hands. Despite this, the nuances of facial expression and posture and body language are amazing. There are levels of James Gandolfini subtleties in the ‘acting’ of the toys!
The human actors are all well up to the task, and while there’s relatively little direct interaction between live and CGI characters, what there is seems un-remarkably real. You don’t even notice the fundamental difference between the two sets.
If the series has a flaw, its that one of the human characters has one of those terrible, wasting, made-for-film diseases that is always presaged by a slight cough in the first reel and ends with the victim in a hospital bed, sans IV drips or masks or even monitors, the only symptoms being being slightly pale and having a bit of a whisper-y voice, but otherwise glowing with good health. I’ve seen Love Story and Brian’s Song, and wound up having to remind myself that it’s not NICE to root for the cancer. Fortunately, we’re spared the syrupy music. The score is mostly based on “Dream, Dream, Dream” often in a minor key, sometimes a rather menacing one. Morpheus would approve.
But that was the only irksome element, one easily overwhelmed by the otherwise robust dramatic plot. The characters are deeper and richer than the ones in Toy Story, and the story is even more genuinely engaging and moving.
Now on Netflix.