“When You Wish Upon a Star” could be the theme song for “Turbo.” In this energetic, funny cartoon about a plucky garden snail (Ryan Reynolds), the star belongs to the neon sign on a Van Nuys strip mall, Starlight Plaza. This rundown shopping center is where our hero, who calls himself Turbo, leaps into his lifelong fantasy of entering the Indianapolis 500 – not some mollusk version of the race, but the actual open-wheel competition. His shell will be his chariot.
The latest film from DreamWorks Animation draws on several hits by rival Pixar (“Cars,” “A Bug’s Life,” “Ratatouille,” even “WALL-E”). But it tells an Impossible Dream fable all its own. It’s as classical as “Pinocchio” and as contemporary as “Fast & Furious 6.”
Turbo decides he wants to be an Indycar champ after watching racing tapes on a TV/VCR gathering dust in a garage. The snail doesn’t stand a chance until he falls into the engine of a drag-racing car and becomes so saturated with nitrous oxide that he acquires super speed. To reach Indianapolis he still needs the help of Tito (Michael Peña), the food-truck driver for the “Dos Bros Tacos” food stand. Tito aims to prove Turbo’s mettle and use the publicity to put his brother’s Mexican cooking on the map, along with the rest of Starlight Plaza.
“Turbo” exudes warmth, humor and ingenuity right from the beginning, when Turbo and his brother Chet (Paul Giamatti) toil at “the plant” – the tomato plant harvested by a colony of snails. In the best and most jolting running joke, a crow abruptly swoops in and seizes a worker, and the survivors casually shrug off each loss.
Turbo, though, refuses to accept his brother’s fate after a crow snatches him: he uses his newfound super-power to rescue Chet. Like the best turns in the movie, it’s a test of character tied to a plot twist. The siblings crash onto a Van Nuys street. Tito scoops them up and introduces them to an improbable stable of streetwise racing snails voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, Maya Rudolph, Snoop Dogg, Ben Schwartz and Mike Bell. They compete on a small toy track. To them it’s as big as the Grand Prix.
In director/cowriter David Soren’s wittiest stroke, Turbo and Chet land in a twinned comic universe. Tito races his normal yet gutsy and determined snails for the delight of his Starlight Plaza neighbors: the owners of the hobby shop (Richard Jenkins), the garage (Michelle Rodriguez) and the nail parlor (Ken Jeong). Tito’s brother, Angelo (Luis Guzman), despairs of Tito’s whimsical ways, just as Chet pooh-poohs Turbo’s wish for racing immortality. But the other shop owners back Tito in every way, just as Tito’s invertebrate stable gets Turbo to “snail up.”
Soren and his cowriters, Robert Siegel (“The Fighter,” “Big Fan”) and Darren Lemke (“Jack the Giant Slayer”), draw amusing parallels between the human and gastropod worlds, sometimes within single shots, as when all four brothers play out their conflicts on radically different scales. (The snails can hear and understand the humans, not vice-versa.) The contrast in perspective is hilarious, especially when Soren cuts between the average snails’ perception of their speed – and the sluggish reality.
“Turbo” is a modest movie. Our snail doesn’t need to overcome temptation the way Pinocchio did. But its mollusk’s-eye-view gives the film a delightful angle on the world. And Turbo is no mere underdog – he’s part superhero, part dark horse. Tito’s racing snails show Turbo that talent alone isn’t enough to win: he also needs grit and inventiveness. What’s more, they teach him that to win a man’s race like the Indy 500, he must run it like a snail – a clever riff on how subcultures can succeed in America without sacrificing their identities.
It’s fun to see sports-film clichés – like a family reunion near the finish line – acted out by characters with twisty eye stalks and long, slimy bodies they can “tuck and roll” inside a shell. The antic visual invention never lets up, whether Tito is tucking Turbo in at night with a ketchup packet as a pillow and a warm tortilla as a blanket, or the racing snails serving as his Indy 500 pit crew, using a vibrating cell phone to massage Turbo’s foot.
Bill Hader’s killer voice performance as Turbo’s human idol, Guy Gagne, a self-regarding French Canadian racing champ, gives the whole third act a huge comedic lift. The five-time Indy 500 winner is asked what keeps him driving, and in Hader’s drollest accent and cadences, Guy responds, “When a cheetah chases after a gazelle, does he ever stop to think maybe I’ve caught enough gazelles?”
He’s counting on just another gazelle. What Guy gets is far more competitive and dangerous — a spunky little turbo-charged snail.
