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Tim Johnson’s film comes from Adam Rex’s book The True Meaning of Smekday but leaves its skeleton behind. The novel is narrated by an eleven year old writing a school assignment for a time capsule opened a century later. That frame is gone; a road trip remains. In the book the humans go to Florida; here they are shipped to the Australian outback. Chief Shouting Bear and Dan Landry are dropped. The sharpest change is a name: the runaway alien is J.Lo on the page and Oh on screen, while Jennifer Lopez voices Lucy, the mother Tip is searching for. The project was called Happy Smekday! until June 2013, and release slid from November 26, 2014 to March 27, 2015. Rihanna wrote an eight track concept album for it, so the songs act less as background than as a second narrator setting the pace. On January 22, 2015 DreamWorks Animation announced roughly 500 job cuts and 290 million dollars in charges. Two months later the film opened to 52.1 million, far above the 30 to 35 million forecast. A good fit if you know most of the jokes ride on Oh’s broken grammar and pick the original voice track. Not for readers of the book: the assignment frame, the Florida route and those two characters are gone.