The One and Only Ivan

MOVIE #1,916 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 08.21.24 Watched this with my daughter after she mentioned that she read the book in school. The film was a COVID casualty, essentially: relegated to unceremonial Disney+ dump instead of a proper theatrical release in summer of 2020. I have young kids who are on that app daily and I didn’t even realize this was a movie until starting this Sharrock D.F. To add insult to injury, it was subsequently pulled from the streamer during The Great Bob Iger Content Purge of 2023 not even three years later! It's basically a lost film now. The point being: pirate everything and anything you can, I guess.

And it’s a damn shame, because this Mike White-penned adaptation is pretty good overall. The story arc is tight, the goofs are amusing, the CGI is really well-done and the voice actors are all solid (except for a sleepy Angelina Jolie who has maybe ten lines but they’re all delivered like she’s half out the door). We had a nice time watching it on Plex ;)

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The One and Only Ivan is a 2020 American biographical fantasy drama film directed by Thea Sharrock from a screenplay written by Mike White based on the 2012 children's novel of the same name by Katherine Applegate. Inspired by the true story of Ivan the gorilla, the film stars the voices of Sam Rockwell as Ivan alongside Angelina Jolie (who helped Allison Shearmur and Brigham Taylor to produce the film), Danny DeVito, Helen Mirren, Brooklynn Prince, Chaka Khan, Ron Funches, Phillipa Soo, and Mike White, with the human characters portrayed by Ramón Rodríguez, Ariana Greenblatt, and Bryan Cranston. It was released on August 21, 2020.