The Son of Bigfoot (2017)

The Son of Bigfoot arrives as a family adventure about a teenage outsider who discovers his long-lost father is a legendary cryptid. The film's social conscience, such as it is, resides almost entirely in its villain: HairCo., a hair-care conglomerate run by a CEO who wants Bigfoot's DNA for profit. His researchers ransack a home, steal a scientist's work, and drag a living creature into a laboratory. The forest is good. The corporation is bad. This is the oldest arrangement in children's entertainment, and the film does not complicate it.

Environmental concern is present but modest, absorbed into chase sequences and helpful raccoons. The mother, Shelly, is allowed competence and a tranquilizer gun, though the emotional architecture of the story belongs to the boy and his father. Adam is described as shy, and the matter is left there. His physical transformation is framed as mutation and superpower, never as a lesson about accepting the body you inhabit. There is no racial commentary, no queer presence, no attention to how a mind might work differently from its neighbors. The film has no interest in any of it.

We are left with a competent, unremarkable cartoon that grossed forty-seven million dollars against a twenty million dollar budget and charmed roughly three quarters of the critics who bothered to show up. It lectures nobody. Its villain is arrested by unspecified authorities, which is a tidy and faintly bureaucratic resolution. A sequel followed, as sequels do. We file this one under lightly progressive, the register of a recycling public service announcement with better animation.