Every so often, I find myself drawn to reviewing movies in pairs, whether it’s because of the same source material (the 2022 Pinoochios), similar perspectives (2018’s BlackkKlansman and Sorry to Bother You), or even diametrically opposed artistic responses to a similar theme (2016’s Manchester by the Sea and Collateral Beauty). However, in my twenty-five years as a fledgling film critic, I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed three movies at the same time for whatever relevancy, yet that is what I find most appropriate for this trio of exceedingly similar films about imaginary friends. Earlier in the year, Blumhouse released Imaginary, their horror-thriller take on an imaginary friend refusing to go away. At the start of the summer, writer/director John Krasinski gave us IF, a live-action fantasy/comedy about imaginary friends finding their former children as adults. And recently, Netflix released an anime movie The Imaginary, a Studio Ghibli-esque fantasy about forgotten imaginary friends trying to find new kids and new homes. I’ve elected to review all three at once and, much like the Pinnochios, declare a winner through different categories.

Begin the critical gauntlet! Bring on the (imaginary) bloodshed!

1. PREMISE

Two of these movies went in a sweetly sentimental direction and the other went in the horror direction, so let’s tackle that one first. Imaginary gets at a rarely spoken truth: children can be super creepy. Watch a child hold an involved conversation with some entity that isn’t there, or just stare into the dark and say, so plainly, “That’s where the eyes are watching me,” or any number of personal anecdotes to make you shudder, and you’ll understand the significant horror potential with a malevolent creature that the child can communicate with that adults cannot see. This also lends itself to a low-budget film production as so much of the wicked entity is implicit and unseen. It’s a cost-saving genius when you can just use your, wait for it, imagination. Now Imaginary isn’t the first horror version of this premise, but it deserves points for taking a childhood concept and thinking of an effective way to transform it into a diseased and malignant antagonist, haunting its adult child Jessica (DeWanda Wise) and seeking a new child, likely her youngest step-daughter Alice (Pyper Braun). It then presents its conflict like a curse that the past generation is trying to spare the next generation from suffering through. Of course this also includes getting adults to recognize the threat as they are often dismissing it. Nobody wants to believe that Chauncey the teddy bear is the one urging you to self-harm.

The other two movies take a far more family-friendly approach to their imaginary premises. There’s a lot of shared real estate between The Imaginary and IF. Both are about outdated imaginary friends finding refuge together in a sort of halfway house, a… foster home for imaginary friends (someone should make a cartoon series about that). Both of the movies follow imaginary friends trying to find new children who will accept them and give them a new life. IF briefly follows the possibility of reuniting the forgotten imaginary friends (a.k.a. IFs) with their former owners now grown up into adulthood. This is actually the movie at its best, as the creatures find a renewed sense of purpose and reconnect with a person they cherished but had to let go. For a strange reason, Krasinski only dabbles with this poignant story direction, switching gears to find them new homes with new kids, which serves as another story direction that is also quickly ditched. IF seems to be trying on so many different versions of its premise and then discarding them like the IFs themselves. The Imaginary has more focus on its central predicament, finding new homes before these characters fade away, or worse, get eaten by a cannibalistic imaginary fiend looking to gain more years of his own existence by consuming the life force of his imaginary peers. It also has the urgency of its main character, an imaginary boy named Rudger, hoping that his child wakes up from a car accident, and if so, that she’ll still need him. The other characters are trying to set Rudger up for a life after his child, since they’ve all experienced the same fate and are trying to help him adjust to not just letting go but also being open to a new child. It’s simplified but has plenty to still explore, plus a creepy super villain.

Winner: The Imaginary

2. WORLD-BUILDING

This is what really separates IF from The Imaginary. The world of imaginary figures populated in Kransinski’s movie are cute but their larger world context is unfortunately underdeveloped. This is likely because much of the movie is connected to the personal journey of one twelve-year-old girl, Bea (Cailley Fleming), trying to keep herself busy while her father (Krasinski) undergoes vague “heart surgery.” The IF Coney Island respite feels like a secret nursing home where the discarded friends just kind of hang out. There’s even swimming and painting lessons. There’s no further examination on whether these are only the IFs from this zip code, though Bradley Cooper voices a talking glass of ice water whose child originated in Arizona, so that’s undetermined. I was also hoping for an imaginary friend from decades back, like Franklin Roosevelt or Alexander Hamilton’s imaginary friend, or from other countries. Each character design can say something inherently about their past child creator, what they regarded as fulfilling or lacking from their present. Alas, the world-building is mostly one little girl’s discovery of her new friends and then how they ultimately support her with her family predicament looming over every scene. Seriously, for a father going through major surgery, the family in IF is pretty blase about Bea’s whereabouts. Her grandmother (Fiona Shaw) doesn’t seem too pressed about letting an unattended adolescent run around New York City for hours. Bea’s experience with helping the IFs are reflections of her optimism and hope. It all comes back to her, so the movie chooses to ignore the larger possibilities of its magical unseen world.

The Imaginary feels modeled after the Studio Ghibli movies that have delighted children and adults for generations. Its main character is Rudger, an imaginary friend, and not the child who birthed the imaginary friend, Amanda. That creates a different sense of discovery, as Rudger also learns about the hidden library housing other imaginary friends and the rules. He’s to stare at a bulletin board and await a prospective child he feels a connection to, then holds onto a picture of them to transport into the child’s imaginative play where they can contribute to the creative adventure. However, there are dangers like if you die in the imaginary world, you can die for real, which is never fully explored as a real threat. The imaginary characters are told to stay indoors at night, as they don’t want to run into Mr. Bunting, the cannibalistic antagonist. I got a little lost with the different rules, some of which seemed to be emphasized more or canceling out previous rules, but I appreciated the level of thought given to making its world alive.

This is also where Imaginary begins to get lost in its own hazy imagination. Imagine the bedroom door-hopping mechanic from Monsters Inc. but with the narrative formula of Insidious, and there you have Imaginary. The world of imagination is treated very similarly to a hellish dimensional getaway, much like what happens in Insidious where dad had to retrieve his son in the demon’s phantasmagorical realm. Because the spooky imaginary world relates back to the main character’s childhood, we have a few other characters that have history with this trauma. Jessica’s father Ben has been committed to a hospital and seemed mentally ill, until you realize he rescued his little girl from evil Chauncey and lost his mind in the process. He’s not some lost cause, he’s a hero. Also, there’s a former neighbor and babysitter (Betty Buckely, always welcomed) who is obsessed with childhood psychology and willing to do some extreme things to continue her obsession with Chauncey. It’s at least widening the scope to look at how these traumatic events have impacted other people, not just the little girl bottling up those nightmares. However, beyond the simple explanation of Chauncey existing as a parasite feasting on the imaginative power of children, little else is established about the creature or its own world. At one point, a character relishes the possibility of imagination as a wish-fulfillment service, but why would this evil creature delegate its power? It reminds me of all sorts of other movies where characters side with some apocalyptic power thinking they’ll somehow be the lucky exception.

Winner: The Imaginary

3. CHARACTERS

This is where IF shined the brightest. The little girl is cute and optimistic, a fitting tonal foil to Ryan Reynolds being such a loquaciously sardonic naysayer. She wants to be so helpful, though keeping herself so busy might just be her coping mechanism to try and stop her dreadful encroaching thoughts about the possibility of losing her second parent. Her taking the lead to help the IFs then allows for little episodic asides for the different characters to share their stories and their former creators. Having a protagonist be so driven at being empathetic is a natural conduit for championing the feelings and triumphs of others. It works. Reynolds is still doing his fast-talking cynical schtick, so your mileage will vary how well it continues to appeal. Curiously, I don’t think the character of Blue (voiced by Steve Carell) is fully utilized. He’s a more childlike exaggeration of the character features already provided by Bea’s involvement. Blue resembles the McDonalds’ Grimace, and is outwardly friendly, unafraid of big emotions, and a bit silly, but his elevation in the script as being the primary IF sidekick is arbitrary. The same story could have afforded tapping, say, the excitable unicorn (voiced by Emily Blunt) as the primary sidekick and produce similar results. Again, I think there’s so much that could have been further explored as to the existential requirement of the different imaginary characters, how they represented what their former kids felt they needed. Their exact existence was what a child yearned for (the strong IF to protect the child who is afraid, the squishy lovable IF to comfort a lonely child, etc.).

The characters from The Imaginary fall into general archetypes that any Miyazaki fan will be familiar with. There’s the bossy know-it-all, the excitable goof, the silent contemplative, the wise and warm-hearted authority figure, the dangerous rogue. They all work but it’s the larger themes that resonate more than any specific individual character. Mostly, the conflict is whether Rudger decides to move on from his creator and find a new child/home. He has loyalty and emotional attachment to little Amanda but the reality is that, at some point, she will grow up and he’ll be left behind. Whether that happens now, because she passes away, or years later through becoming an adult, there will be a parting and he will need to consider a new life. The loneliness and melancholy of this existence is ignored through the kooky characters, strange worlds, and pressing points of danger, so the reality of Rudger’s eventual loss is thematically sidelined.

With the Blumhouse Imaginary, the characters are relatively stock types for a supernatural horror mystery. There’s some effort to make it about Jessica trying to ingratiate herself with her new step-children, the oldest who looks at the new mom with great suspicion and resentment. At one point, the old mom serves as a jump scare, hiding in the house; the old mom is mentally ill but the stepdaughter thought, erroneously, that mom was “getting better.” Jessica is trying her best to rise to the challenges of being a parent, but it’s hard when there’s a sneaky ghost trying to emotionally manipulate your youngest to hurt herself. I don’t know why Jessica decided to move her new family back into her childhood home, the source of her trauma, except if you looked at the real estate market, it might have been by far the best deal she could swing. What’s some reawakened childhood trauma when it comes to skipping ballooning mortgage payments? Have you seen interest rates and the price of houses post-pandemic? That’s the real terror for adults.

Winner: IF

4. EMOTIONAL INVOLVEMENT/CONCLUSIONS

Despite what Pixar may have set in stone, it’s not a requirement for a children’s movie to make you cry. I did end up tearing up from two of these movies, and it should likely be obvious which of the three was the outlier. Krasinski’s movie is designed as a big warm hug, complete with soothing, milky light pouring in from every setting. I thought it looked very similar to how Steven Spielberg’s preferred cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, shoots natural light, and lo and behold Kaminski was the cinematographer for IF (excuse my pat on the back here). Bea’s big emotional moment where she tells her story of adventure to her unconscious father in his hospital bed pulled some heartstrings, but what I felt even more emotionally cathartic were the asides where Bea helps the IFs reunite with their former kids. When an IF is being thought about, they start to glow from within, like happiness radiating out. It was these little moments, like Blossom (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge) getting to dance with Bea’s grandmother like they used to, or the simple act of Blue wishing good feelings to his nervous former-child with a silent shoulder touch and world-clarifying exhale. It was the acknowledgement that these friends, while gone, are still fondly remembered, and that they will always have that connection even if their exact relationship has changed through the years. The Imaginary operates on a similar emotional wave of adults reuniting with their former childhood friends, and it’s that sweet acknowledgement of appreciation and love that hits hardest. It reminded me a little bit of 2001’s Amelie where she’s on a mission to help strangers remember beloved items from the past. The overarching worry about losing her father seems unnecessary as a complication, especially how “heart surgery” is kept so purposely vague and seemingly uneventful until that bedside chat. There is a difference between wanting to protect your kid from the possible trauma and downplaying it to the point where it becomes a strangely superfluous plot device.

I won’t pretend there’s much to get emotional over with the Blumhouse Imaginary, though there is one Act Two twist I thought was simply astounding, but in order to explain I will need to go into spoilers, so you have been warned, dear reader. For a solid hour, we watch Alice play with a teddy bear that she calls Chauncey, the embodiment of her imaginary friend. So far so good. Then after a disturbing session with a child psychologist, the professional shows Jessica her recorded session. This is where we discover that Chauncey the bear… has never been there. Alice has been talking to the unseen entity of Chauncey and Jessica has been the only person who was seeing a teddy bear. That’s right, the twist is that the bear was never there. Bam.

Winner: IF

Three imaginary friend movies and the exploration of the meaning these figures have to children and adults after years removed. I had my quibbles with each movie, but with adjusted expectations, each movie can supply a degree of entertainment. The animation in The Imaginary is gorgeously fluid, so that alone will prove a draw to hand-drawn animation fans such as myself. Krasinski’s family film is gooey at its well-meaning core though it has underdeveloped avenues I wish had been given more articulation and exploration. The Blumhouse Imaginary movie is fairly formulaic but has a couple enjoyable twists and turns, even if they’re ridiculous. There is a potent storytelling reservoir with imaginary friends, both benevolent and malevolent, so I imagine (no pun intended) this won’t be the end of these stories making their way to the big screen.

Nate’s Grades:

Imaginary: C

IF: B

The Imaginary: B