Dream Works Animation’s newest film revolves around Yi (Chloe Bennett), a teen loner who befriends a young Yeti and has a wonderful adventure with her friends.
Yi lives in Shanghai in an apartment building with her mother and grandmother. She’s coping with the loss of her dad and secretly works after school to earn money so she can travel to places that her father always wanted to take her. After a day of babysitting and dog walking, she goes up onto the apartment block roof to practice her violin, where she’s surprised by a young Yeti. When she realizes he’s been injured, she bandages him up, names him “Everest” and promises that she will guide him back home to Mt. Everest.
He’s scared of the people that are in big helicopters trying to re-capture him. They work for Burnish (Eddie Izzard), an old explorer who wanted to display Everest to prove he had really discovered the creature on a previous expedition.
Yi is reluctantly joined by Jin (Tenzing Norgay Trainor) a teen and his young cousin Peng (Albert Tsai) who live on the floor below. They follow at first in order to return Yi to her home, but soon are having a great time.
Written and co-directed by Jill Culton, the film is fun, sweet and family-friendly. The kids’ personalities are well developed. Yi is smart and hurting from her loss, which her family doesn’t seem to understand, Jin is self absorbed with selfies and girls, Peng is just a happy-go-lucky kid and the Yeti is totally adorable.
There’s chase scenes, a couple of fun scenes, one with giant blueberries exploding juice on the kids, some heart-warming scenes and even some magic thrown in. The three little girls that joined me had a great time and so did I.