The most dangerous location of our everyday life, the one that decides whether you are lucky or unlucky in life, good or bad luck, is the toilet. It starts with the toilet paper roll, which you handle and which idiosyncratically rolls out through the gap under the locked door into the inaccessibility, and extends to the fully automatic flushing, which is triggered by the smallest drop and then hastily washes a lucky penny down into the bowl .
Sam Greenfield can attest to that in the Peggy Holmes animated film “Luck”. She describes herself as the girl with the biggest possible bad luck. She lives in a home for orphaned girls and hasn’t made it to an adoption in all these years – bad luck even. Her little friend Hazel still has hope, she has a conversation with a potential couple soon. Could hapless Sam give her the little luck she needs? Sam is now eighteen and has to leave the home, she gets her own apartment, basement, and a job, and bravely fights her incessant bad luck.
Emma Thompson didn’t want to be in the film because of the allegations against Lasseter
“Luck” is the first major film that Skydance Animation is releasing on Apple TV+, supervised by John Lasseter. The company hired him after he left Pixar/Disney, for whom he had brought massive box office and a few Oscar nominations with the “Toy Story” films, the “Cars” series or “Up”. Then employees accused Lasseter of sexual misconduct. They accused him of hugging, touching or kissing her without her consent. First he went on a kind of sabbatical, then he flew completely. So now the comeback, but not without headwind. Emma Thompson, who was supposed to voice a role in “Luck”, resigned because of Lasseter. But in the film Jane Fonda is part of the party, as a pink dragon in the Land of Luck.
The Land of Luck is a factory beyond our reality, the helpers include cats and leprechauns – from Irish legends – said dragon lady and a unicorn with a crush on her with German origin and pronunciation: Holy straw bag!
Here all the small events and coincidences are artfully fabricated from which people’s good luck and bad luck is made up, by dedicated nerds who act like hackers and in which, of course, the Skydance Animation team is reflected. Unhappiness also has its elegance – a smeared toast doesn’t land clumsily with the jam side down on the floor, but first hits the wall and then tumbles down the wall with a snap: breakfast slapstick. With the mechanization of work and the assembly line, the view of processes has changed radically. Now there is movement without someone to trigger it. And in the cinema you can confidently take a step into the void, because there is always a pane in your way that you step on and which transports you on. lucky ballet. Director Peggy Holmes used to work as a choreographer, she was already on “The Fabulous Baker Boys”, 1989.
When Sam sits on the curb in front of a bar one night and bemoans her loneliness, she involuntarily gives a morsel of her panino to a black cat next to her, and it’s incredibly distinctive and demure the way he nibbles on it. The cat’s name is Bob, and unfortunately he loses his lucky penny he’s traveling with – and Sam finds it: will it bring luck to her little friend Hazel!? But family that forever family above all, was never the center in the Lasseter films, the true relations and emotions are horizontal, old and new friendships and solidarity. But not too much. Bob draws the conclusion – Simon Pegg speaks him, a Scottish black cat, they bring a lot of luck there – and thus also alludes to John Lasseter: “Cats are not really huggers …” Cats don’t necessarily want to be hugged and cuddled.
lucky, 2022 – Directed by Peggy Holmes. Book: Kiel Murray, Jonathan Aibel, Glenn Berger. Editing: William J Caparella. Music: John Debney. Original Voices: Eva Noblezada, Simon Pegg, Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Flula Borg. Apple TV+, 105 minutes. Streaming start: August 5, 2022.