96 min | PG | August 6, 2021 | Netflix
A music-loving kinkajou loses his partner and inherits an unfinished love song. He sets out across Florida to deliver it to the woman it was written for. The songs soar. The map underneath them is laminated.
A snake and a kinkajou named Vivo busk for coins in a Havana plaza with an old musician named Andrés. Vivo plays a tiny instrument and understands human speech, but humans hear only chittering. When a letter arrives from a famous singer Andrés once loved, the story becomes a courier mission. Vivo carries an unsung love song across Florida to deliver words that a dying man never said aloud. The film is about the songs people write and never perform, and the cost of waiting.
Lin-Manuel Miranda voices Vivo with the rapid, syllable-stuffed delivery he built his career on, and the animation gives the character expressive hands and a constant nervous energy. Ynairaly Simo plays Gabi as a loud, off-key, neon-haired kid who refuses to be managed, and her tantrum-energy songs cut against the polished numbers around her. Juan de Marcos González grounds the opening as Andrés with a weathered warmth that the rest of the film chases. Gloria Estefan plays the singer Marta Sandoval and lends the central ballad real gravity. Brian Tyree Henry and Michael Rooker turn a spoonbill and a python into a comic detour through the Everglades.
Kirk DeMicco directs from a script he wrote with Quiara Alegría Hudes, and the songs do the structural work the plot will not. The animation saturates Havana in coral and turquoise, then shifts the Florida sequences toward swampy greens that flatten the energy. The strongest visual idea arrives when Vivo performs and the screen abandons realism for hand-drawn flourishes that bloom out of the frame. Those interludes show what the film could be when it trusts music over machinery. The rest moves on rails toward the destination you predict in the first ten minutes.
This is a competent, warm musical that knows exactly what it is and never reaches past it. The salsa rhythms and the central elegy give it a pulse that the road-trip plotting keeps interrupting. Every obstacle resolves on schedule, and every lesson lands where a family movie files its lessons. Miranda’s score is the reason to watch, and the story is the reason it stops short of memorable.