Underdogs (2013)

An Argentine-Spanish co-production and, at twenty-one million dollars, the most expensive animated feature ever produced in Latin America, Underdogs arrives with the weight of national ambition and a screenplay loosely borrowed from a Roberto Fontanarrosa short story. Juan José Campanella, fresh from The Secret in Their Eyes, turns his attention to a shy foosball virtuoso, a kidnapped sweetheart, and a set of table football figurines that spring to life. The inventory of contemporary social preoccupations here is, and this is said without reproach, close to empty. The cast is Argentine because the film is Argentine. The romance is conventional. Nobody in the village is having a conversation about identity, and the climate does not enter the frame.

The one faint tremor of class resentment comes from Grosso, the world's finest footballer, who returns to his hometown, buys the entire village outright, and paves it into a stadium. The mayor escapes by helicopter. It is a satisfying image, and it gestures toward the wealthy treating a community as a personal grievance to be demolished. But Grosso's motive is vanity and a seven-year-old grudge over a foosball match, not profit, not extraction. He is a sore loser with a checkbook, which makes him a villain, not an argument.

What remains is the ending, where the crowd turns on the victorious Grosso and applauds Amadeo for losing gracefully. Teamwork over selfishness. It is the moral every children's sports picture has carried since the invention of the whistle, delivered plainly and without a sermon attached. Laura spends most of the running time as a thing to be rescued. The American dub, assembled years later with Ariana Grande and Mel Brooks, is a separate artifact entirely.