Crocodile rocking is something shocking
Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile is not a good film, which comes as absolutely no surprise whatsoever. It is surprising, perhaps, that it isn't much worse - and "much worse" is, to be fair, in the eye of the beholder. Nothing could be more understandable than somebody subjecting themselves to this film and declaring it an unmitigated disaster. It is alarmingly free of narrative structure, for one thing: 106 minutes is not a short running time and there aren't that many subplots in the screenplay that Will Davies has adapted from a pair of children's books by Bernard Waber, 1962's The House on East 88th Street and 1965's Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (incidentally, despite their age and apparent status as canonical childhood classics, the first I ever heard of them or of Waber was when this movie was announced). But somehow, there's still nowhere remotely enough time to actually execute all of the character arcs satisfactorily. There are two entirely different and unrelated scenes where the affable singing crocodile of the title (his songs are perform by pop prodigy Shawn Mendes, and he does not otherwise speak a single word of English) meets a human adult who thinks he's a hideous, unspeakable monstrosity, and by the end of the scene they're the absolute best of friends, and there is absolutely no reason presented within the scene itself why this should have happened. He sings a song in one of them, so at least you can tell the filmmakers knew they had to distract us from the missing three or four scenes that actually describe the adult's change of heart. In the other one he just lets a guy win at wrestling.
Before going any more into that - and there's certainly more bad than good to say about Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile - I will pause myself, and point out that while it is understandable why someone would declare this an unholy terror of slapdash, don't-give-any-shits filmmaking for children, I can't go there myself. Truth be told, I think parts of this work - work well, even. The most crucial of these is Lyle himself. If anything is going to work about the film, the CGI animated crocodile at its heart needs to work, and the character has been stuck with the considerable handicap of being functionally wordless. Sure, Mendes can sing the songs and all, but he's certainly not acting the songs, which are all either covers of actual pop songs, or originals written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul to sound rather more like pop singles than showtunes ("rather more like pop singles than showtunes" is, of course, the core of the Pasek & Paul aesthetic). There's not a lot of room for drama there, and Mendes isn't audibly attempting to find what room might be available. So all of the character work falls on the animation team, and God damn me if they haven't gone right ahead and done a pretty lovely job of animating their lead. He's got to hit a fairly narrow target: sufficiently realistic texture to feel like he's actually interacting with the human cast, but enough of a simple cartoon that when he expresses child-friendly emotions on his big, earnest face, it doesn't zoom us right into the Uncanny Valley. And just for a fun additional bonus, he needs to look like one of the most instinctively terrifying predators on the face of the planet, but also have us never feel anything but warm, pleasant feelings towards him. These goals are all met, and I will admit, without shame, to thoroughly enjoying my time spent looking at Lyle: he's a good cartoon crocodile.
He's stranded in a fairly tepid children's movie, sadly, though I think for the most part that Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile is a harmless experience. Save for one thing: the ongoing theme, returned to enough times that it cannot possibly be an accident, that a mom who wants everybody in the family to have good, healthy, home-cooked organic food is a real fucking lame-o square, and it's way more fun to go dumpster diving and hope for the best out of whatever pastries you find there. Harmless other than that.
The busy and muddled plot basically goes like this: a terribly low-rent but charismatic stage magician, Hector P. Valenti (Javier Bardem) adopts Lyle when he hears the baby crocodile singing along to the radio at a pet store. Hector's attempts to make Lyle a great musical star go awry when it turns out that the croc has absolutely devastating stage fright, and in attempt to stave off his giant mountain of debt, Hector sells his huge New York brownstone and abandons Lyle as he tours the country with his reedy show. 18 months later, the house is now in the possession of a private elementary school, which uses it to house the new head of its math department, Mr. Primm (Scoot McNairy). Primm has brought with him his second wife (Constance Wu), and his son by his dead first wife, Josh (Winslow Fegley), who of course is going to be our protagonist, and not because he's the only Primm with a given name. Josh is terrified of moving to the big, crime-ridden hellpit that is New York, even to a huge Manhattan brownstone worth more money than an elementary math teacher probably makes across an entire lifetime of work, and he has made a big show of remaining friendless and alone. Except, he bumps into Lyle in the attic, and in hardly any time - literally, in less time than it actually should take - Lyle has charmed the Primms, and encouraged them to welcome the returning Hector into their lives. Except that Josh still has that social anxiety, however buried, and Lyle still has that darn stage fright, and it would take something preposterously unlikely like a live talent show on national television broadcast right out of their neighborhood to solve both of these problems in one stroke.
The most preposterous part is not, admittedly, the talent show. It's that the talent show - the nationally broadcast live talent show that's the season finale to a program implied to have American Idol-level reach - cannot possibly take place any later than about 9:00 AM.
Also, the subtext that Mrs. Primm and Lyle are fucking is so persistent and close to the surface that it's damn near text.
This is all so much boilerplate, and not very admirably executed, save for the animation; it also boasts inexplicably good cinematography, courtesy of Javier Aguerresarobe, who makes sure all of the interiors glow with dusky beauty, and the nighttime exteriors have a soft neon golden quality. The acting is mostly terrible: Wu has clearly determined that the script doesn't care about her character even a tiny bit, so it would be a sucker's game to do anything other than say her lines, hit her marks, and avoid falling asleep on camera. Fegley portrays Josh's joyful happiness at befriending Lyle and his neurotic fear of other children with the same expressions of clench-mouthed strain, as though he needs them to finish this take right now or he's going to shit his pants. Bardem is making some extremely terrible choices, but at least they're fearless and big choices, and he is committing to them without restrained; he's obviously happy to be making a kids' film, where he can just ham up a storm and not have it matter.
As far as the music, which is basically the only reason Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile exists, it's all as slickly anthemic as anything by Pasek & Paul. I have joked in the past that they can only write one song and they just write it a bunch of times and poof! it's a musical, but in this case they've kind of literally done that; there is one song here that gets three reprises, which takes us out of the realm of Broadway musicals and into Wagnerian leitmotif. And that's not even the version of the one Pasek & Paul song that I think is actually kind of pleasantly earwormy: that honor goes to "Top of the World", which is also one of the two times that codirectors Will Speck & Josh Gordon seem to realise that making a musical means they get to stage numbers (the other is "Rip Up the Recipe", where the "cooking healthy food is fascist" theme gets turned into a dance). Mendes has a shallow, overproduced voice, but it works well for these songs, and it's probably not a coincidence that "Top of the World" is a solo number, so we don't have to cope with things like the previously untapped horror of Javier Bardem's singing voice. Anyway, it's all very peppy and shiny and lifeless, but at least it's amusing when it's matching the overly-articulated mouth of a cartoon crocodile, and that's pretty much all it was ever worth hoping for out of this project.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Before going any more into that - and there's certainly more bad than good to say about Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile - I will pause myself, and point out that while it is understandable why someone would declare this an unholy terror of slapdash, don't-give-any-shits filmmaking for children, I can't go there myself. Truth be told, I think parts of this work - work well, even. The most crucial of these is Lyle himself. If anything is going to work about the film, the CGI animated crocodile at its heart needs to work, and the character has been stuck with the considerable handicap of being functionally wordless. Sure, Mendes can sing the songs and all, but he's certainly not acting the songs, which are all either covers of actual pop songs, or originals written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul to sound rather more like pop singles than showtunes ("rather more like pop singles than showtunes" is, of course, the core of the Pasek & Paul aesthetic). There's not a lot of room for drama there, and Mendes isn't audibly attempting to find what room might be available. So all of the character work falls on the animation team, and God damn me if they haven't gone right ahead and done a pretty lovely job of animating their lead. He's got to hit a fairly narrow target: sufficiently realistic texture to feel like he's actually interacting with the human cast, but enough of a simple cartoon that when he expresses child-friendly emotions on his big, earnest face, it doesn't zoom us right into the Uncanny Valley. And just for a fun additional bonus, he needs to look like one of the most instinctively terrifying predators on the face of the planet, but also have us never feel anything but warm, pleasant feelings towards him. These goals are all met, and I will admit, without shame, to thoroughly enjoying my time spent looking at Lyle: he's a good cartoon crocodile.
He's stranded in a fairly tepid children's movie, sadly, though I think for the most part that Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile is a harmless experience. Save for one thing: the ongoing theme, returned to enough times that it cannot possibly be an accident, that a mom who wants everybody in the family to have good, healthy, home-cooked organic food is a real fucking lame-o square, and it's way more fun to go dumpster diving and hope for the best out of whatever pastries you find there. Harmless other than that.
The busy and muddled plot basically goes like this: a terribly low-rent but charismatic stage magician, Hector P. Valenti (Javier Bardem) adopts Lyle when he hears the baby crocodile singing along to the radio at a pet store. Hector's attempts to make Lyle a great musical star go awry when it turns out that the croc has absolutely devastating stage fright, and in attempt to stave off his giant mountain of debt, Hector sells his huge New York brownstone and abandons Lyle as he tours the country with his reedy show. 18 months later, the house is now in the possession of a private elementary school, which uses it to house the new head of its math department, Mr. Primm (Scoot McNairy). Primm has brought with him his second wife (Constance Wu), and his son by his dead first wife, Josh (Winslow Fegley), who of course is going to be our protagonist, and not because he's the only Primm with a given name. Josh is terrified of moving to the big, crime-ridden hellpit that is New York, even to a huge Manhattan brownstone worth more money than an elementary math teacher probably makes across an entire lifetime of work, and he has made a big show of remaining friendless and alone. Except, he bumps into Lyle in the attic, and in hardly any time - literally, in less time than it actually should take - Lyle has charmed the Primms, and encouraged them to welcome the returning Hector into their lives. Except that Josh still has that social anxiety, however buried, and Lyle still has that darn stage fright, and it would take something preposterously unlikely like a live talent show on national television broadcast right out of their neighborhood to solve both of these problems in one stroke.
The most preposterous part is not, admittedly, the talent show. It's that the talent show - the nationally broadcast live talent show that's the season finale to a program implied to have American Idol-level reach - cannot possibly take place any later than about 9:00 AM.
Also, the subtext that Mrs. Primm and Lyle are fucking is so persistent and close to the surface that it's damn near text.
This is all so much boilerplate, and not very admirably executed, save for the animation; it also boasts inexplicably good cinematography, courtesy of Javier Aguerresarobe, who makes sure all of the interiors glow with dusky beauty, and the nighttime exteriors have a soft neon golden quality. The acting is mostly terrible: Wu has clearly determined that the script doesn't care about her character even a tiny bit, so it would be a sucker's game to do anything other than say her lines, hit her marks, and avoid falling asleep on camera. Fegley portrays Josh's joyful happiness at befriending Lyle and his neurotic fear of other children with the same expressions of clench-mouthed strain, as though he needs them to finish this take right now or he's going to shit his pants. Bardem is making some extremely terrible choices, but at least they're fearless and big choices, and he is committing to them without restrained; he's obviously happy to be making a kids' film, where he can just ham up a storm and not have it matter.
As far as the music, which is basically the only reason Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile exists, it's all as slickly anthemic as anything by Pasek & Paul. I have joked in the past that they can only write one song and they just write it a bunch of times and poof! it's a musical, but in this case they've kind of literally done that; there is one song here that gets three reprises, which takes us out of the realm of Broadway musicals and into Wagnerian leitmotif. And that's not even the version of the one Pasek & Paul song that I think is actually kind of pleasantly earwormy: that honor goes to "Top of the World", which is also one of the two times that codirectors Will Speck & Josh Gordon seem to realise that making a musical means they get to stage numbers (the other is "Rip Up the Recipe", where the "cooking healthy food is fascist" theme gets turned into a dance). Mendes has a shallow, overproduced voice, but it works well for these songs, and it's probably not a coincidence that "Top of the World" is a solo number, so we don't have to cope with things like the previously untapped horror of Javier Bardem's singing voice. Anyway, it's all very peppy and shiny and lifeless, but at least it's amusing when it's matching the overly-articulated mouth of a cartoon crocodile, and that's pretty much all it was ever worth hoping for out of this project.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
