In the Blink of an Eye

The movie’s big-heartedness is what makes it so essential and, potentially, to those not enamored by its oddball charms, so cloying. But given the state of the world, with each new day bleaker than the last, a movie that is this unabashedly sweet is something that should be treasured, protected and celebrated, not frowned upon.

Stanton has done truly incredible, groundbreaking things in animation, and he’s almost certainly got a great live-action film in him, but In the Blink of an Eye makes one wonder if Stanton should go a bit smaller and work his way up to such grandiose concepts like this.

Overall, there is so little texture to these character arcs that the actors are mostly just working in service of a blandly uplifting message. It’s as if they’ve all been commissioned by a well-funded science museum to lend their bodies and voices to the cause of slickly comestible up-with-people infotainment.

Written by Colby Day, In the Blink of an Eye attempts no less than the sweep of life from big bang to unknown verdant planets, with the emotional depth of a tide pool and the complexity of a cave painting.

It feels hurried, generalized, inattentive. There’s no specificity, no immersive sense of people actually living their lives. Again, that’s probably partly intentional. But it sure feels like a miscalculation for a movie about the survival of humanity to have so little humanity in it.

In the Blink of an Eye is 2026’s first true dud.

The only meaningful connection made over the course of the movie is the one between its actors, whose inability to salvage their material does more to braid them together than any of the machinations of Day’s script.