Turbo may be vanilla, formulaic animation but it’s an underdog story with undeniable heart – afforded buckets of charm by its talented voice cast. With more and more animated features leaning on quickly fading cultural references, risqué winks aimed at parents, and goofball low blows, Turbo is happy as a clam (er snail) to just be an earnest family movie with a heart of gold. It isn’t formula-changing nor is it distinctly original – and it is certainly easy to foresee the end of the racetrack from miles ahead – but it’s a film that’s almost impossible to dislike and will most likely charm your pants off.   

As a Ryan Reynolds skeptic, early doubts are cast with him in the position of voicing Theo – the lead snail (later re-named Turbo). Reassuringly though, Reynolds has checked his snarky pomp at the door, taking up a tone far more sincere than what we’ve come to expect. This is the Reynolds we met in the fantastic Buried, not the Green Lantern blockhead.

Instead of zinging jokes off left and right, Reynolds voices Turbo with restrained honesty. Turbo’s wide-eyed view of the world is childlike; his goals, ambitions and Reynolds’s take manages to nail the awing bent of his little snail counterpart. Like many animated characters before him, he’s a dreamer – a character caught in a limited community with no escape and sky high aspirations. He’s in need of a talent that just doesn’t come naturally to him.

In Turbo’s case, he’s a snail and he wants to go fast. When he’s not watching for tomatoes to fall from the branches of his humble little garden he and his snail troupe occupy, Turbo watches Formula One racing on television, idolizing international French super-racer Guy Gagné (Bill Hader). Like Ratatouille‘s Gusteau, Gagné (French for “wins”) props up a similar idea that no dream is too big and no dreamer too small. But unlike Gusteau, Gagné’s act may be just that.

Back in the garden, Turbo’s daily grind is pretty dull. Aside from lawn mower threats and the occasional crow nabbing up one of the community members for a tasty treat, life is slow moving, or dare I say, sluggish. Like the great outcasts and dreamers of the past, no one quite understands Turbo and take to openly mocking his speedy ambitions. Turbo’s toughest critic is also his only surviving family member – his cautious brother, Chet (Paul Giamatti).

When Turbo’s excessive self-confidence puts the community at risk, him and his brother are exiled and Turbo goes for a head-hanging, slime-trailed crawl to the highway overpass. At this point, adults in the audience are much more aware of the suicidal undertones – with the somber mood similarly informing that interpretation – but this is a kids movie…right?! Whether or not this little garden snail was about to off himself or not, something magical happens as Turbo gets knocked from the bridge and sucked into a drag-racing car’s engine at the exact moment that it’s being flooded with NOS. For those readers who have yet to see the Fast and Furious franchise – NOS is short for Nitrous Oxide, a chemical accelerant that can be installed in your car for an instant boost of several hundred horsepower. Naturally, the NOS attaches to Turbo’s DNA gene sequencing in much the same way that Peter Parker became Spiderman and just like that, Turbo isn’t slow anymore. In fact, he can rip up past speeds of 200 mph.

However absurd the premise is, it’s endearingly executed so when Turbo does gear up his powers, you’re cheering for him rather than guffawing the flapdoodle logic. Alongside his super speed, Turbo is also equipped with other car-like gadgetry like reverse beeping when he’s moving backwards, high beams and a ghetto-blaster – none of which really come into play other than as quick gags to gather up the kiddie laughs.

With his newly acquired skills, Turbo, with brother Chet in tow, unexpectedly join the ranks of a snail racing crew. It’s here that the film flaunts it’s Fast and Furious-esque aspects as each snail character has their own little personality quirks and the cast, like that franchise, is noticeably multiracial. The crew is led by Samuel L. Jackson voicing Whiplash, the cocky but amiable leader of the snail trail dashers. I don’t need to tell you that Turbo is faster than the other snails so when frightfully obese but fatally loveable Tito (Michael Peña) sees just how speedy little Turbo is, his own dreams of grandeur propel him to enter Turbo in the Indie 500.

Just writing up these little plot details make the whole project seem like a menial exercise in disposable family-friendly material churning but you have to take the overwhelming genial nature of the project into mind. Like all animated film, you have to accept a degree of suspended disbelief. Whether it comes in the form of a sentient robot, talking toys, or a cooking rat, these characters are likeable and memorable not because of their dummy descriptions but because of their overwhelming heart, the amount of perky escapism they allow and the moral lessons they impart.

While it doesn’t quite possess the unmitigated originality of Pixar‘s golden age, it does carry a similar heart-on-its-sleeve air to it that is immensely breathable. Rather than capriciously turning on itself and trying to be something greater than it is, Turbo maintains a benevolent sweetness that wins over our smiles and goodwill. There isn’t a bad bone in Turbo‘s body and even though the result is somewhat akin to easy listening, it’s easy listening that you don’t mind slowly nodding along to.

B-

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