Metacritic reviews

Vivo is strategically contrived to hit audiences’ pleasure spots, blending a grown-up-friendly story of a Latin-music couple whose careers took them in separate directions with all the hyper-caffeinated comedy action the kiddos expect from the medium. Plus, the songs build on one another, hooking in your head and snowballing as the movie develops.

The film’s computer-animated visuals, vividly rendering such locales as Cuba, Key West and the Everglades, are consistently arresting. But it’s the joyous musical numbers and sentimental but never treacly tale at its center that make Vivo such a winning effort.

While a majority of the movie is a rambunctious road trip with a few call-outs to Studio Ghibli (Michael Rooker’s Lutador the giant python would likely earn a smile from Miyazaki), there’s heart in the evolving relationship between Gabi and Vivo and a solid emotional payoff at the end.

A sweet if slight love story.

If the Miranda musical touches are getting familiar, they’re still a lot fresher than the script here, yet another story of a pet animal on a mission and its special bond with a lonely child.

The eye-popping gloss of Vivo will probably lure in impressive numbers for Netflix (the animation itself is generic but impressive) but in a genre that promises so much magic, the spell cast by Miranda and co is a brief one.

Vivo is plenty colorful, with a bright pastel palette both when the film’s action takes place in Cuba and in Florida, though the backgrounds are far less detailed than would be ideal. It’s good, but not good enough. The same is true of the story, and of the songs.

More family-friendly than for-all-ages-friendly — but lively work from the thriving Sony Animation makes this energetic Lin-Manuel Miranda musical mostly worth your time.

Vivo grows increasingly generic and forgettable as the film goes on, and the closer its furry hero gets to finding a silver lining, the more viewers wish that he never went looking for one at all.

Like practically every other animated movie meant for mass consumption, the movie gets lost in the chase — the point where story flow is interrupted so that characters get lost as they try to achieve their objective and a manufactured villain is trying to keep them from their goal.