In Smallfoot, a children’s animated feature, the Smallfoot Evidentiary Society or S.E.S. as they call themselves, works under cover on the highest altitudes of the Himalayan Mountains. Hidden by a very thick layer of clouds, which no man dares to cross, lies a village whose inhabitants are the keepers of some of the world’s biggest secrets, all set in stones (literally).

They know that their homeland fell out of the butt of the giant sky yak, the mountain they live on is held by giant mammoths on their backs hidden by clouds under which there is nothingness and that the gong must be rung every day to wake up the light snail who will pass over the sky to cause day. They listen to their Stonekeeper (voiced by Common), whose forefathers devised a system to keep the village safe from predators and hence, they cannot challenge the Stonekeeper nor say that the stones are wrong.

It is only when Migo (Channing Tatum) misses his aim while practicing ringing the gong with his head and falls beyond his village wall that he finds a ‘smallfoot’, a human whose plane crashes into the mountains. And this is when the young Yeti (also known as Bigfoot to us humans) discovers that the stone which says smallfoot don’t exist, is actually wrong.

This gets the S.E.S. led by Meechee (Zendaya), the Stonekeeper’s daughter, along with Migo and other members of S.E.S. including Kolka (Gina Rodriguez), Gwangi (LeBron James), and Fleem (Ely Henry) to search more intently for humans, which leads them to Percy Patterson (James Corden), a wildlife documentary filmmaker who has fallen out of the ratings spotlight.

What ensues is what the message of the movie is all about: The young Yetis, although shown to respect traditions and elders, have the curiosity for questioning the status quo. Meechee and her friends work with Migo to prove practically that even if at first it seems that popular perceptions may be true, it is worth looking for the truth. This is illustrated by Migo’s friendship with Percy, with the latter saving the Yetis when the police wants to capture them, discrediting the Stonekeeper’s long held view that all humans are bad and only want to harm the Yetis.

Meechee also discovers that it was the humans’ fear of Yetis that led them to become the perpetrators, emphasising on the lack of acceptance of those unlike us and the consequences that can have. Another overarching lesson of the movie is the responsibility that each of us have towards the other, especially of those in power: The Stonekeeper as the village elder, although has a mechanism in place, which the Yetis don’t know that they themselves are feeding by creating the clouds that are keeping that part of the mountains cut-off from humans, his motive is to protect them and keep them away from harm’s way. While on one hand he is covering up a big political lie, on the other hand his well-meaning and not-so-selfish stance highlights the importance of a strong family and community bond.

All in all, Smallfoot is another social commentary by the Warner Animation Group with political themes communicated in a way that kids can understand. Touching upon issues like abuse of the working class, border control, communicating differences and the influence of power politics; they are communicated in a subtle manner with the idea of evolutionary thinking and finding a reason behind each, rather than promoting rebellion and revolution.

Published in Dawn, Young World, October 20th, 2018