The painfully generic new animated Addams Family deserves no snaps
Photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures
If recent pop culture fans know The Addams Family at all, they probably remember it as a 1960s TV show, a 2010 Broadway musical, or a set of 1990s movies directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. But the “creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky” family actually started life as a series of satirical cartoons drawn by Charles Addams and published in The New Yorker between 1938 and 1988. The hook of the glossy new animated feature about the macabre family is that it returns to the look of those original Addams cartoons, capturing the tentacled train of Morticia’s dress, Gomez’s rotund figure, and Wednesday’s oval face in perfect verisimilitude.
Yet even as animation veterans and Sausage Party co-directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan hark back to the...