Leo (2023)

Leo arrives as a Netflix animated musical about a 74-year-old tuatara confronting his mortality in a Fort Myers fifth-grade classroom, and it conducts itself with the mild manners of a substitute teacher who has read the room and decided not to raise his voice. Adam Sandler voices the reptile. Bill Burr and Cecily Strong fill in around him. The songs are catchy, the animation is slick, and the whole enterprise radiates the soft glow of a Happy Madison production that has finally decided to be nice.

The classroom is stocked with a naturally multiethnic roster of children, and Jo Koy lends a Filipino-American voice to one of them, but the film never comments on any of it. The kids are simply kids. Race sits in the background like a spare chair. There is no LGBTQ presence, no critique of wealth or class, no interest in body image, and the Everglades that Leo dreams of reaching function as a personal bucket list item, not a conservation sermon. The closest the film comes to a social argument is its handling of anxious children: Eli's nerves and Summer's compulsive talking are met with patience and quiet advice, which gestures toward emotional literacy without ever naming it.

Where the film does lean forward is in its advice-giving. Leo dispenses wisdom to each student in turn, and the closing instruction to look out for one another lands the moral with the firmness of a note sent home to parents. It is gentle, it is well-meaning, and it is entirely uninterested in the cultural battles of its moment. A film about a lizard who wants to see the swamp before he dies should perhaps aim higher than a group hug, but there is something almost admirable in its refusal to pick a fight. The result is a warm, harmless hour and a half, culturally room-temperature, and content to stay there.