Spies in Disguise

Nick Bruno and Troy Quane’s animation comes from Lucas Martell’s 2009 short Pigeon: Impossible; when it was announced in October 2017 Will Smith and Tom Holland were already attached. It is Bruno’s first feature. The pair read the bird as equipment rather than as a punchline: a real pigeon sees ultraviolet, takes in almost everything around it at once and banks its wings to nearly ninety degrees. Lance is designed against himself, the immaculate agent reduced in bird form to a dumpy body and eyebrows added so he reads apart from the flock. The governing rule is that Walter’s inventions do not kill. Quane puts it as violence left largely in the hands of the villains rather than glorified. Theodore Shapiro wrote the score and Mark Ronson ran the songs; the two took a music nomination at the 47th Annie Awards, where José Manuel Fernández Oli was nominated for character design. Neither won. It became the last Blue Sky Studios feature to reach cinemas; Disney closed the studio on 7 April 2021. A good fit if it amuses you that the hero spends most of the film as a bird with no hands and every device on screen is built not to kill. Not for anyone waiting on the moment a spy story settles its account, deliberately left empty here.