The One and Only Ivan (2020)

Disney's adaptation of Katherine Applegate's novel arrives by way of Thea Sharrock's direction and a Mike White screenplay, tracing a silverback named Ivan who has spent two decades as the drawing attraction of a failing mall circus in Central Florida. The animals talk, the visual effects were nominated for an Oscar and lost to Tenet, and the whole affair was shuffled onto Disney+ in August 2020 when theaters were unavailable. It is a gentle, well-intentioned piece of family entertainment, and it knows exactly what it wants to say.

The casting is pleasantly varied, with Ramón Rodríguez, Indira Varma, and Eleanor Matsuura in conventional supporting roles, though the film never pauses to remark on any of it. A woman directs, and Julia, Stella, and Ruby carry much of the emotional weight, but no feminist argument is ever articulated; the elephants are simply sad and the girl is simply kind. The closest thing to a political reading concerns Mack's operation, a business that commodifies animals for ticket sales and is eventually shut down by protesters. That is animal welfare, not an economic polemic, and the film treats the shutdown as a happy ending instead of a reckoning.

What the film does possess is moral instruction, delivered softly. Ivan paints a mural of his jungle home, a reporter amplifies the cause, protesters gather, and the circus closes. The closing credits show photographs of the real Ivan, just in case anyone missed the point. It is sermonizing for the preschool set, and it works well enough on those terms. Everything else, the identity politics, the climate anxieties, the body-image discourse, the neurodivergent reading, the historical revisionism, is absent. Some films carry the weight of the age. This one carries a crayon.