Close encounter: Migo (voiced by Channing Tatum, left) and Percy (voiced by James Corden) meet each other.

Humans are agents of both kindness and unspeakable horror. From time to time, they can be both the oppressed and the oppressors.

This is a strange way to open a review of a heartwarming animated musical called Smallfoot, which tells the story of a community of yetis (the big and hairy creature, otherwise known as the Abominable Snowman, whose existence remains unclear) living in the Himalayan mountains.

The story is about how a yeti village lives under the norms and mores that keep them from knowing about the existence of a creature they call smallfoot, also known as humans.

Like yetis to us, we are a myth to them. Stones bearing prophecies, guarded by a benevolent Stonekeeper (voiced by Common), dictate the way they live. They live in the mountains overlooking a cloud. Below, there’s nothing; nobody ever questions it — there’s no reason to, anyway.

One day, a yeti called Migo (voiced by Channing Tatum), spots a pilot, which leads to his encounter with another smallfoot called Percy (voiced by James Corden), a television personality whose career has largely tanked.

Wanting to prove to his village that smallfoot is real, he’s banished from the village and encounters a secret society called the Smallfoot Evidentiary Society (SES), whose primary aim is to prove the existence of humans.

The SES is spearheaded by a kind yeti called Meechee (voiced by Zendaya), Gwangi (voiced by LeBron James), Flem (voiced by Ely Henry) and Kolka (voiced by Gina Rodriguez). Together with them, Migo encounters the cost and the unspoken consequences of meeting a human.

The reason Smallfoot sounds predictable is because it is. But there’s something else about the movie that is clever.

The twist: By positioning humans as myths, the movie speaks of the many ways curiosity can be a double-edged sword.

By positioning humans as myths, the movie speaks of the many ways curiosity can be a double-edged sword (‘curiosity kills the yak’, as the Stonekeeper says in the movie). It’s also a clever way to explore a tricky question that resonates well with the audience: If a society is happy and functional, why not just follow blindly to a set of rules that have proven to work for centuries? Why rock the boat?

One example of the villagers’ faith in the rules is Migo’s father, Dorgle (voiced by Danny DeVito), who’s esteemed job involves him banging his head onto a gong to make the sun rise. His head has become flat after years of doing the job, which he does happily. He’ll later realize that, without him banging the gong, the sun still rises. How he ponders upon his identity after that is the perfect distillation of a thesis that Smallfoot argues really well.

Apart from the message, Smallfoot is a largely joyful movie. It has songs, albeit very forgettable ones.

Directed by Karey Kirkpatrick from a screenplay by Kirkpatrick and Clare Sera, Smallfoot zeroes in on human-like interactions the yetis have with each other and also with the humans: Percy and Migo’s encounter is moving.

And the animation is beautiful. The image of the Himalayas has stayed with me, despite its lack of color. All the adventure sequences are well done and telegraph the story really well. It’s a competently made animation. All of this, however, is again, pretty predictable.

The weight of the message can’t lift Smallfoot out of the “in-group or out-group” tedium. But still, there’s some sort of reversal of a myth that keeps Smallfoot swimming from shallow waters.

— Photos courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

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Smallfoot

(Warner Bros. Pictures; 96 minutes)

Director: Karey Kirkpatrick
Voice actors: Channing Tatum, James Corden, Zendaya, Gina Rodriguez, Common, Danny DeVito