Another dismal, algorithmically produced digital animation here, evidently the first off the production line from a new US-Spanish company, Skydance Animation, which has the former Pixar chief John Lasseter as its creative head. Everything about this robotically made movie looks derivative and contrived; the videogame aesthetic is dull and the quirky high concept plays like a pound-shop knockoff of Inside Out and Soul.
Sam (voiced by Eva Noblezada) is an 18-year-old kid who has grown up in a quaintly imagined orphanage-slash-girls’-home in an identikit US city. She has been plagued by bad luck all her life, not merely in being an orphan (the backstory there is primly never mentioned) but in tiny little things such as bumping into objects and losing her keys – although this micro-level bad luck could also be called klutziness. Just as she is moving out into her own apartment with a job (I guess no question of higher education), Sam becomes sadly preoccupied with a little kid in the home who is poignantly failing to get a foster family, just as she herself failed to. If only Sam could somehow give her a piece of good luck.
