Lifted (2006)

User Review

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  TheMovieDiorama

  5 / 10

  Lifted abducts the usual Pixar sentimentality for light extraterrestrial mediocrity. Much like a driving test, aliens apparently need to pass an abduction test which entails activating a plethora of switches that have no clear labels or instructions as to what they actually do. Naturally, our jiggly extraterrestrial is confused, and starts flicking random switches in a bid to abduct the human farmer with the spaceship's tractor beam. Alas, the farmer (in the deepest sleep ever) is bumping and grinding against walls, ceilings and miraculously finding himself downstairs.
  
  Rydstrom's directorial debut is a dash of spacey fun (not the Kevin kind...) that, whilst enjoyable, will easily be forgotten about five minutes later. There's no staying power for this cartoonish premise, and that's because it merely is just a fully rendered cartoon. Purely an exercise in resonating certain body parts, which the studio would utilise in later feature films, wrapped in some caricature child-friendly fun. The visual humour is prolonged for the entire five minute runtime and rapidly disintegrated upon the two minute mark, mostly because the humour wasn't varied enough. The alien characters however, whilst emotively limited, did exhume some personality to make them characterised. The animation style itself was good, but given the excellent standard of Pixar short films that preceded this, I can't help but feel somewhat dejected by what I can only describe as a step back. What I will say though, is that passing a driving test is probably much easier than passing an abduction test...

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