Home Review: Nothing Like the Book

When the animated film Home (Dreamworks, 2015) first came out, I was excited to see it. I’d enjoyed the book on which it’s based, Adam Rex’s The True Meaning of Smekday (2007).*

Although I missed its initial run in theatres, I was pleased to discover Netflix had acquired the streaming rights. So, because Boyfriend and I both spent the Easter long weekend sick as dogs, we settled down to watch it.

Spoiler: it was pretty disappointing.

The things I liked about the book were gone. I don’t need to tell you what went in its place: you’ve already seen that story a million times. There are no twists or surprises waiting for you if you’ve seen movies before, and the humour appears to have been decided by committee (“kids think that’s funny, right?”).

To be fair, this is how I felt about Despicable Me, and lots of people love that. So maybe you might like this one too; I don’t know. But here’s the stuff I missed from the book.

1. Thoughtful racialized protagonist

The book is about a twelve-year-old, dark-skinned, mixed-race girl named Tip who befriends an alien and takes him along on a desperate quest to find her mom and, oh, save human civilization. Despite parts of it not really being so worth saving, maybe?

The movie, however, is about a bland alien, voiced by a white guy, who “doesn’t fit in” with the other aliens because he’s an awkward dreamer. Colonizing is so hard! “Oh” learns valuable lessons about family and courage from Tip, the human girl he meets along the way.

Now, when this movie first came out, I saw anecdotes of joy from parents whose kids saw an animated character who looked like them on a movie poster for the first time ever. That’s not something to sneeze at.

But it would have been great if the movie were still about that character, instead of making her main purpose to serve the white-guy-stand-in’s journey of personal growth.

Tip’s character development in the book was refreshing, not drawing on clichés. She didn’t have to believe in herself or open her heart to love. She had to learn to trust her own self-sufficiency and quick wit and to accept an unfair world without giving up on changing it. Which, I get it, is more difficult to dramatize when most of the visual language of this kind of story is set up to explore the first type of narrative instead of the second. But why not try?

2. Satire

Like I wrote above, the movie is a saccharine story about learning to try even when there’s no chance of success and opening your heart to love your family and friends. And, you know, that’s fine. There are jokes about human habits and characters who embody over-the-top caution, but you’d be hard-pressed to call this movie a critique of anything real.

But the book goes out of its way to criticize contemporary Western culture. It’s satire: it uses humour and exaggeration to point out the flaws in contemporary politics and ways of thinking.

That means its story of colonization is connected to the Western history of, you know, colonizing other peoples and then racializing them, alternately stamping out and stealing parts of their customs and culture, and establishing privileges for ourselves on their backs. Rex uses the Boov — and his racialized, young, American, female protagonist — to point out that, hey, this thing we’re laughing at is part of a history in which many readers are complicit. Rex may not always be successful (see link at the end of the post), but the movie doesn’t even try to address those political ramifications.

The True Meaning of Smekday takes on smaller social issues too, from celebrities to electoral process. It hits the sweet spot of being funny if you don’t understand the underlying real-life analogy and even funnier (though sharper) if you do.

Kids are smart. So are their parents. Why blend everything unique into the same old jokes when there’s so much of that out there already?

3. Rough edges of reality

The book’s balancing act really shines in the way it assures the reader of a happy ending (we know Tip winds up in good enough circumstances to be writing the titular essay) while still making the reader worry about little stuff. We know this isn’t the kind of book where a main character will starve to death and have to shoot hordes of looters, but it’s also not the kind of book where the author forgets the protagonists have to figure out what they’re going to eat and how to find the next working toilet.

What are the protagonists of Home eating? That doesn’t seem to concern them much. They do get gas at a gas station and find some snacks, but the movie generally glosses over the necessities of their day-to-day life.

Similarly, the book doesn’t shy away from showing the hard edges of being a kid (or a loser sad-sack, like the Boov the movie calls “Oh” and the book calls “J-Lo”). One of the reasons Tip and her new alien friend get along is because they’re both used to being overlooked by those in authority, and the book addresses how together, they struggle to work around authority that doesn’t value them.

For example, one of the biggest problems Tip faces in the book is adults who think they know better: who don’t believe her that her mom is white because her own skin is brown, who are confident they have the best plan for fighting off these aliens despite no experience with them whatsoever, who assume that just because Tip is twelve, they can write off her experience and make her do what they want “for her own good.”

We see Movie!Tip interact with approximately zero adults in a meaningful way, apart from her mom, in which case the meaningful way is, “Mom! I missed you! I love my family!” Which, while nice, isn’t exactly the same thought-provoking stuff from the book.

So, all in all, I can’t recommend this movie; there are tons of other features that do what it does better, and it will just frustrate those who liked the book or parts of it.

* Though Debbie Reese’s keen and thoughtful analysis has prompted me to think about a lot more of its important, problematic aspects. I’m very grateful for that.