The One and Only Ivan Parent Guide

The circus at the Big Top Mall is in trouble and its star act, Ivan the silverback gorilla (voiced by Sam Rockwell), is worried. He tries roaring more loudly and beating his chest more fiercely, but attendance continues to lag. Then Ruby, a baby elephant (voiced by Brooklynn Prince) arrives and circus owner Mack (Bryan Cranston), believes she will save the show. As the crowds applaud for the shy little pachyderm, Ivan’s self-esteem takes a blow. He sighs “It’s not the baby’s job to save the troop. It’s my job. I’m the silverback.”

Ruby’s arrival does more than threaten Ivan’s sense of self; it also changes the direction of his life. When Stella, the circus’s aging elephant (voiced by Angelina Jolie), faces the end of her life, she asks Ivan to promise to take Ruby away from the circus. “I want her to have a life different from mine,” she pleads. “I want her to be free in a safe place. Not a cage.” With this promise to keep, Ivan’s goals pivot from shoring up the circus to leaving it for good, but this is going to be more difficult than he imagines…

The One and Only Ivan is a good family film. It’s not a great movie but it’s not a terrible one either and that’s a pretty comfortable place for a show to be. Comfort seems to be the goal here: the film provides lots of reassuring and uplifting messages about friendship and loyalty, about living your dreams, and about sharing your distinct talents and gifts. It avoids looking too deeply at anything that could cause unease – like the complicated relationship between Ivan and Mack. Their lives are intertwined, Mack having adopted Ivan as a baby and raised him in his own home, destroying his marriage in the process, and creating a relationship defined by affection, control, mutual need, and resentment. Those tangled emotions become increasingly mixed with grief and pain when Ivan remembers his years in the wild. As Ivan mourns his lost family and expresses his personality through art, the movie raises questions about animal rights…and then fails to address them.

Although the film seems to take the easy path through the story (which is based on a real life silverback gorilla), the computer whizzes at Disney go hard into creating the CGI animals. Their work is spectacularly successful. The elephants have skin that looks dry and wrinkled and Ivan’s face and fur are incredibly, beautifully detailed. But the most amazing part of their work is the animals’ eyes. As I watched the movie, I kept asking myself how computer animators could give these animals souls. The Mouse House has largely overcome the problems it had with CGI animals in The Lion King and has created critters whose emotions can be seen in their faces. Worry, fear, doubt, discouragement, hope, deceit, pain, fatigue, surprise, happiness – all of these feelings play out across the pixels that somehow combine to make eyes that shine, dim, beam, twinkle and glare.

With its impressively detailed animal characters and heartwarming story, The One and Only Ivan promises a pleasant movie night for kids, especially if they like animals, and maybe even their parents too. It even comes with a life lesson: don’t wear a toupee while training an elephant. (You’ll have to watch the film to find out why.)