Review: Vivo (2021)

Vivo

Rating

Director

Kirk DeMicco, Brandon Jeffords

Screenplay

Kirk DeMicco, Quiara Alegria Hudes, Peter Barsocchini

Length

1h 35m

Starring

Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ynairaly Simo, Zoe Saldana, Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, Brian Tyree Henry, Gloria Estefan, Michael Rooker, Nicole Byer, Katie Lowes, Olivia Trujillo, Lidya Jewett, Christian Ochoa

MPAA Rating

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Review

For his third directorial effort, screenwriter Kirk DeMicco takes audiences from the streets of Havana, Cuba to the vibrant nightlife of Miami, Florida by way of sunny Key West. From the musical mind of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the film gives us an array of satisfying new songs for the likes of Miranda and Gloria Estefan to sing with a number of fascinating characters and situations surrounding them.

The story starts off with a street musician named Andrés (Juan de Marcos González) whose trained kinkajou assistant Vivo (Miranda) helps him thrill and entertain crowds each day at a busy fountain in Havana. Andrés receives an invitation from an old friend, celebrated singer Marta Sandoval (Estefan), to join her in Miami for her farewell performance. He decides then that it’s time to see her again and tell her what he longed to tell her so long ago, that he loves her. However, the night he makes his decision, he passes, leaving behind a distraught Vivo. With a song that Andrés wrote for her and a desire to grant Andrés his final wish, Vivo decides to deliver the song into her hands himself. When his nephew’s daughter Rosa (Zoe Saldana) arrives with her daughter Gabi (Ynairaly Simo) in tow, he hatches a plan to stow away with her and find his way to Miami, a plan that expectedly goes awry.

Watching Vivo will instantly transport you back to the great Disney animated adventures we once got on a regular basis. While the film uses a not particularly interesting computer-generated modeling for its characters, there are throwback sequences set to music that recall Disney’s two-dimensional mastery, a welcome sight for any Disney-phile.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s score fills itself with that Latin sound that Estefan helped bring to a global audience, her casting a compelling symbolic reference the film makes to its roots. Miranda’s songs are lively and fit well into the film’s various sequences thanks to the artists’ creative energy, but only two of the songs really stand out from the rest, “My Own Drum,” which Gabi sings to celebrate her individuality and “Love’s Gonna Pick You Up” sung by a pair of spoonbills Vivo helps to fall in love. In the framework of Miranda’s cinematic musical oeuvre to date, with tracks for Moana and Mary Poppins Returns as comparison, this is his most enticing work so far.

If you’ve ever enjoyed Estefan or Miranda’s work, the resultant feature surrounding them is an aural pleasure blending her soaring, richly texture vocals with Miranda’s rapid-fire delivery. It’s an interesting dichotomy that’s surprisingly well blended in a film that feels both fresh and familiar. That said, Miranda’s line delivery is ultimately underwhelming. His Vivo seems less vibrant vocally than he should be, a wild animal adrift in a foreign land. While exotic animals don’t have to sound unbearably unique, it would have been nice to feel more energy coming off his character, especially being the central one.

Simo, on the other hand, is a star in the making. Gabi is a crackerjack of a character whose originality and self-confidence is engaging. She’s as rambunctious as Vivo is subdued and to that extent, the characterizations work. Simo’s vocal work in song is equally exciting, helping make “My Own Drum” stand out for its tonally divergent sound. In the context of the story, it seems fitting that this teenager impresses against such a traditional backdrop and storyline. Simo, and the three girls who voice her scout troop compatriots, makes Vivo soar when it might otherwise have plateaued.

Vivo is both a tribute to the brilliant work of animation’s past and a conceptually new direction for animated musical adventures. However, for all its best features, Vivo is sometimes a rather middling work and that makes it hard not to both love the film and be frustrated by it for not being all that it could have been. Regardless, It’s a fun time and while not everything works, enough of it does to make the end result something quite a bit magical.