Flora & Ulysses
Year: 2021
Rating: PG
Length: 95 minutes / 1.58 hours
After months of holding out, I finally managed to gain a Disney+ subscription. While this has allowed me to watch plenty of excellent original content like The Mandalorian, I also have options like Flora & Ulysses (2021). I never paid for cable before, so I missed out on a lot of Disney Channel original movies, which now inhabit a section of Disney+ that I don’t think I’ll be revisiting any time soon. Of course, I realize this movie wasn’t made for me, but that doesn’t excuse many of its flaws.
It’s a little weird to me that after decades of the same type of after-school specials, the plots haven’t changed that much. Sure, Flora & Ulysses was originally a book, which doesn’t excuse its treatment here as just another story about a child coping with their parents’ separation through some fantastical element (in this case, a “superpowered” squirrel). The fact that the squirrel doesn’t seem to have any superpowers other than some clever camera work is perhaps a fault of not thinking big enough when it came to the list of potential superpowers. “Flight” and being able to communicate? Really? Not laser eyes or retractable metal claws?
Added to the less-than-fantastic exploits of this squirrel are the unbelievable characters. The worst offenders are the parents, both of whom separated for the stupidest reason. Let’s also not forget that a newspaper reporter came to write about a struggling author in a small town as if there was literally no other news of significance or import to print that day. In today’s publishing climate, if an author can’t churn out regular hits, they’ll be homeless in no time at all. Overall, so much of this movie broke my suspension of disbelief, which was probably why it never made it to theaters.
A sub-par “Disney Channel”-type movie, I give Flora & Ulysses 2.0 stars out of 5.
