But, as in “Bambi,” this device is used not to manipulate the audience but to enrich the stakes of the story. (It happens pretty quick.) “The One and Only Ivan” is a Disney animal tale in which not one but two parental critter figures die. And as soon as we hear that Stella’s foot is hurting, but there isn’t a thorn in it, we know where that’s all going. From the moment that she and Stella wrap their trunks around each other, we know they’re going to have a mother-daughter bond. Suddenly, there’s a new arrival: Ruby, an adorable baby elephant who bats her eyelashes like Dumbo and is voiced in sugary tones by Brooklynn Prince (from “The Florida Project”). In flashback, we see that he raised Ivan in his own home (which was enough to chase away his wife). We get to know Ivan’s fellow critters, who are right out of the Disney playbook: his mangy-mutt best friend, Bob, voiced by a spiky-and-what-else-would-he-be Danny DeVito, plus Henrietta the baseball-playing chicken (Chaka Khan), Snickers the frou-frou poodle (Helen Mirren), and Stella the wise old elephant, voiced by Angelina Jolie, who wraps the most serenely mournful of tones around poetic thoughts like “Don’t you just love the moon, with its untroubled smile?” Keeping all this in check is the circus’s owner and ringleader, Mack ( Bryan Cranston), who’s a ham and maybe a bit of a carny-barker fraud, but an okay dude just the same. The difference is that Ivan’s pensive, totally lifelike gorilla face expresses the sadness he can scarcely bring himself to talk about.įor a while, “The One and Only Ivan” is a tender creature-feature hangout movie.
He may not have had Andy Serkis to model motion for him, but he’s every bit as expressive a simian as Ceasar from the “Planet of the Apes” films.
“The One and Only Ivan” combines live action with digital animals, and the creation of Ivan, in particular, is marvelously effective. It’s enough to scare the kids in the audience, but as Ivan confesses to us, speaking in Rockwell’s amiable skewed tones, he’s not really angry it’s all an act, one he’s been selling for 20 years. There, he’s the star attraction in a shopping-mall circus, which features a menagerie of animals and builds to the moment each day when Ivan, rearing up on a platform, beats his chest and roars with fury like King Kong. Based on a captivating true story, which Katherine Applegate took off from in her 2012 Newbery Medal-winning novel (the basis of Mike White’s screenplay), it tells the tale of a silverback gorilla, Ivan (voiced by Sam Rockwell), who lives in a partially glassed-in cage at the Big Top Mall and Video Arcade at Exit 8.
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