A snarky turtle, voiced by comedian Bill Burr, shares a terrarium with Leo, a more mild-mannered lizard voiced by Adam Sandler.
At the age of 74, Leo discovers he has a special gift for helping kids on the cusp of middle school – though he's getting awfully tired of Charlotte's Web. ("No one gets to eat Charlotte," Leo opines, "You just have to hear about this delicious spider for days and get hungry thinking about it.")
Leo is a coming-of-age musical with a Saturday Night Live sensibility. Members of the cast and creative team - including Sandler, Cecily Strong, co-writer/director Robert Smigel and animators and co-directors Robert Marianetti and David Wachtenheim - all spent time working on SNL.
“Leo” has self-awareness with a slight adult edge from the beginning, so it gets the reference to E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web out in the open early. It's the book the students will have to read, which they groan about while fearing their curmudgeonly substitute, Ms. Malkin (voiced by Cecily Strong). But therapy is larger on the minds for this story, and each time 74-year-old lizard Leo goes home with one of the students for the weekend, he both reveals that he can talk and also that he knows what each child needs to hear. One girl is losing out on friends and connection because she talks too much; a sheltered boy (who is even followed around by a dutiful drone) learns to climb walls and dangle over the side; a snotty girl realizes that while her father (Jason Alexander) has success as Dr. Skin, it doesn’t mean she's better than her classmates; a lovable lunkheaded boy says he doesn’t know where babies come from.
On a writing level, Leo bucks a lot of familiar animation tropes. Rather than sending a sheltered lizard on a great-outdoors adventure and/or having him meet a special kid to bond with, the movie works its way into an appealingly clever structure: Each weekend, Leo goes home with a fifth-grader, attempts to escape, accidentally reveals that he can talk, and winds up offering some grown-up (maybe even downright grandfatherly) advice to kids who feel adrift in Mrs. Malkin’s newly strict classroom. It’s a neat and even surprising dynamic, punctuated by Smigel and company ribbing the formal rigidity of so many big-studio cartoons. When one kid’s family launches into a musical number – the film is a full musical, with half a dozen songs – the movie cuts away to another room, where the song can be heard continuing from the other side of the wall. The filmmakers are both conscious of and delightfully unconcerned with rules; the very fact of Leo’s talking isn’t governed by some kind of loophole explaining how people can understand him and why. He just keeps quiet around humans, noting that if word gets out about his ability to speak, they’ll “try to kill him, like E.T.”
To reassure the kids they're not alone in their insecurities, Leo tells them, "Remember, everybody's scared."
Sandler says he had plenty of days when he felt scared growing up.
"I remember moments when a kid would say something that would throw me off and a teacher would spot it and then somehow make their way over to you and just say something calming... and just let you feel comfortable and able to concentrate again, that was very memorable."
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