Home (2015)
Directed by Tim Johnson
No — Home is not especially woke, scoring 26 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Home arrives in 2015 as a DreamWorks animated comedy about an alien occupation, a road trip, and a cat named Pig.
Consciousness Markers
Features a Black teenage girl as the lead protagonist (voiced by Rihanna) and a Latina mother (Jennifer Lopez), a notably diverse cast for a 2015 DreamWorks animated film.
Tip is a resourceful female protagonist who drives the action and rescues her mother, but the film lacks an explicit feminist thesis.
Mild moralizing about accepting outsiders and taking responsibility, typical of children's animation but not aggressively preachy.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext are present.
The Boov's displacement of humans is a mild xenophobia/colonial allegory at most, but race is never addressed explicitly.
No climate change themes or environmental crusading are present.
The film critiques an alien leader's lies and cowardice, not capitalism or economic inequality.
No body positivity themes or body-diverse messaging are present.
Oh is an awkward outcast, but the film does not explicitly engage with neurodivergence or neurodiverse identity.
The story is entirely fictional science fiction with no historical revisionism.
Why it received this score
Home arrives in 2015 as a DreamWorks animated comedy about an alien occupation, a road trip, and a cat named Pig. It is loosely adapted from Adam Rex's The True Meaning of Smekday, and loosely is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. The plot concerns Oh, a Boov outcast, and Tip, a thirteen-year-old girl who evades relocation, and the two of them drive a flying station wagon toward Australia. It opened at number one and made $386 million, which tells us more about the spring release calendar than about the film's convictions.
On the matter of representation, the film is quietly ahead of its era for a 2015 studio cartoon. Tip is a Black teenage girl voiced by Rihanna and she carries the entire narrative. Lucy, her mother, is voiced by Jennifer Lopez. Neither fact is announced, debated, or turned into a lesson. Tip is resourceful, she pilots the action, she rescues her mother, and she saves the day with a gravity device. That is a female protagonist with agency, though the film never builds a thesis around it. It simply lets her drive.
Elsewhere the ledger is thin. Oh is an awkward misfit, but the film treats his strangeness as comic material, not as neurodivergent identity. There is no climate lament, no economic rage, no body-diverse messaging, no queer subtext. The Boov relocation of humanity gestures at colonialism, but the film declines to say so. It settles for a mild sermon about accepting outsiders and owning your mistakes, delivered with the gentleness of a bedtime story. Captain Smek lies, the Boov cower, Oh confesses, everyone learns something. It is moralizing of the softest possible variety, and the film is far too busy being colorful to lecture anyone at length.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Part of
Synopsis
When Earth is taken over by the overly-confident Boov, an alien race in search of a new place to call home, all humans are promptly relocated, while all Boov get busy reorganizing the planet. But when one resourceful girl, Tip, manages to avoid capture, she finds herself the accidental accomplice of a banished Boov named Oh. The two fugitives realize there’s a lot more at stake than intergalactic relations as they embark on the road trip of a lifetime.
Questions about Home
Is Home woke?
No — Home is not especially woke, scoring 26 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Based.
Does Home have any woke elements?
2 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Representation Casting (60) and Feminist Agenda (30). On Representation Casting: Features a Black teenage girl as the lead protagonist (voiced by Rihanna) and a Latina mother (Jennifer Lopez), a notably diverse cast for a 2015 DreamWorks animated film.
How does Home compare to other 2015 movies?
It ranks #51 of the 289 films from 2015 we've scored; their average is 15. The wokest is Chi-Raq (78).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.