Luck (Skydance Animation, Apple Original Films, Ilion Animation Studios, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

During our recently concluded vacation to visit my husband Charles’s mother Edi in Martinez, California, we watched five movies of varying levels of interest. The first, which we saw on July 27, was Luck (2022), a computer-animated film produced by Skydance Animation in association with Apple Original Films and a Madrid-based studio originally called Ilion Animation until it merged with Skydance. I’ll say at the start that I generally don’t like computer animation; it doesn’t have either the realism of live-action or the flexibility and (in rare instances) artistic quality of drawn animation. I have liked a few computer-animated films, notably Ratatouille and Soul, because the creativity and genuine emotions of their stories overcame my overall distaste for the look of computer animation. Luck was not so – pardon the pun – lucky. It’s the work of committee-driven processes, and looks and sounds like it. The concept for the “original” story (quotes definitely merited) was by Rebeca Carrasco, Juan De Dios, and Julián Romero, though the story itself was by Kiel Murray, Jonathan Aibel, and Glenn Berger, with Murray getting credit for the script as well and Julia Miranda supplying “additional dialogue.” The film also went through changes of director (Peggy Holmes replaced Alessandro Carloni) and composer. John Debney, son of 1950’s Walt Disney Studios TV producer Louis Debney (Zorro, The Mickey Mouse Club) and a major contributor to Disney projects in various media (movies, TV, theme parks), replaced Tanya Donelly (a well-traveled woman rock musician who’s been in the bands Throwing Muses, The Breeders, and Belly) and the L.A.-based band Mt. Joy.

There are also two names on the producers’ list that gave an air of creepiness to the project. One was David Ellison, owner of Skydance Media and Donald Trump groupie (and son of Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who famously said that in the age of the Internet “Privacy is over; get used to it”), who just arranged to acquire Paramount and CBS and to ensure government approval of the transfer of CBS’s broadcast licenses paid Trump what amounts to a $30 to $35 million bribe ($15 million to settle Trump’s preposterous lawsuit against 60 Minutes for allegedly defaming him by editing an interview with Kamala Harris in which Trump did not appear, and $15 to $20 million worth of free airtime to promote Trump-selected causes) and offered Trump Stephen Colbert’s head on the proverbial silver platter. The other was John Lasseter, founder of Pixar Studios and essentially the inventor of this style of computer animation. Lasseter was put in charge of Walt Disney Studios’ entire animation department when Disney bought Pixar, until he was fired for sexually harassing his female employees in 2017 in one of the earliest triumphs of the “#MeToo” movement. Emma Thompson originally signed to be one of the voice actors for Luck, but dropped out of the project on principle when she heard Lasseter was involved. Given that many of the people on the project, including Peggy Holmes, Kiel Murray, and John Debney, had previously worked with Lasseter on Pixar/Disney projects, Luck has the look and feel of a Pixar/Disney film in exile.

Basically it’s your standard-issue adolescent quest narrative centered around Samantha “Sam” Greenfield (Eva Nobelzada), who’s the recipient of continuous bad luck. When the film opens she’s just turned 18 and has therefore aged out of the orphanage where she’s grown up. She pleads with the management to be allowed to stay at least two more days to help the chances of her best friend, Hazel (Adelynn Spoon), to get adopted and find a “forever family.” Sam is told that’s not allowed, but she is placed in her own tiny apartment and is also given a job at a retail store, where because she’s the unluckiest person in the world she has a disastrous first day. On her way home from work she finds a magic coin – a penny with a four-leaf clover insignia – and the next day she’s super-competent on her job until she accidentally flushes the penny down a toilet. She offers to share her sandwich with Bob (Simon Pegg), a black cat with a Scottish accent who lives and works in the Land of Luck and needs his penny back to be readmitted there. When Bob finds out Sam has lost his crucial penny, the two journey down a magic portal to the Land of Luck, run by a race of leprechauns. They try to pass Sam off as a leprechaun, explaining her much larger than normal leprechaun size by saying she’s from Latvia. It turns out the Land of Luck has three levels: Good Luck, Bad Luck, and the “In-Between,” sort of like Catholic Purgatory. There is also a gadget called the “Randomizer,” run by a unicorn named Jeff (Flula Borg) who has a crush on the ruler of the whole Luck land, Beth the Dragon (Jane Fonda), which takes both good and bad luck and randomly distributes them to Earth people.

Luck is derivative of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and even Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (while the scene in the Bad Luck Bar can’t help but recall the Cantina scene in the original Star Wars), though I give the writing committee points for making the protagonist exactly 18 years old and suddenly thrust into an adulthood for which she’s completely unprepared. I also liked the way the writers worked into the plot line the fact that in England, as in the U.S., black cats are symbols of bad luck, while in Scotland black cats are symbols of good luck (which is why Bob, who’s really English, poses as Scottish through most of the film). Frankly, I’d have liked Luck a whole lot better if it had been done as a live-action film, with Nobelzada on screen as well as on the soundtrack (based on her imdb.com head shot she’d have been as right for the part visually as she is vocally), with little people playing the leprechauns and the animals supplied with CGI. As for John Debney’s score (the main reason I wanted to watch Luck in the first place), it’s a good, strong piece of functional film writing, delivering the goods expected for a children’s fantasy but not all that interesting or stirring as a listening experience on its own. And the original soundtrack album on Milan Records does not contain Madonna’s song “Lucky Star” – sung not by Madonna but by Eva Nobelzada with second vocalist Alana De Fonseca (that surprised me! I had assumed it was Madonna’s original record with Nobelzada singing along) – despite its importance in the overall film. The reissue on Intrada (the two-CD set I’m reviewing for Fanfare) does contain a short version (1:17) of it on track 13 of CD two.