8.7

Startlingly Creative Fantasy Sketch Gets the Most Out of Every Element

By Jim Vorel  |  July 30, 2025 | 3:07pm
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Startlingly Creative Fantasy Sketch Gets the Most Out of Every Element
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When it’s been ages since the last time you saw a lower-budget, FX-heavy debut feature where every element simply works in tandem, it can be sort of shocking to see something like Sketch doodle its way into theaters. With a silly genre premise that could easily have been rendered as either an Asylum-esque B movie or a four minute SNL sequence, Sketch instead stands out as a triumph of movie-making chutzpah, an impressively confident and well-executed combination of family comedy, adventure, fantasy and even the occasional twist of horror and suspense. Beautiful to look at, sharply written and impeccably performed by its child actors, it’s a frankly incredible debut for short film and commercial director Seth Worley, demonstrating a deep grasp of populist entertainment. This guy just gets it, and the result is a movie that feels bound to be cited as a cult classic in the making.

Sketch is, oddly enough, being distributed by Angel Studios in its theatrical release, an indie outfit primarily known for sappy Christian content, but there’s not a whiff of that overtone to be found here. Rather, this is clearly Worley’s baby, as he’s credited as not only writer and director, but editor as well. That level of involvement and control helps to give this monsters-on-the-loose fantasy a level of clarity that is refreshing and beguiling, familiarizing the viewer quickly with its characters and immersing them in a family setting that captures the rare sense of organic believability that so many productions struggle to replicate from the era of films that so clearly inspired this one.

That mold is quite clearly the Amblin-esque 1980s family/kids adventure, but where all too many productions in the last decade have attempted to slavishly recreate that kind of feel-good, all-ages energy, Sketch seems to do so while barely trying, remembering via its child characters in particular that this film is set in the here and now, rather than transplanted from 1985. Its Gen Alpha protagonists don’t read as if they’re written by a 40-year-old man, to Worley’s credit, and he manages to both make them read as actual kids and emotionally attuned beings, who are all “going through some stuff.”

Amber (Bianca Belle) is a grade school student who is the chief stuff-goer-througher; a creative and spunky young girl who has been struggling with anger and depression following the death of her mother. Father Taylor (Tony Hale, toning down the histrionics) and older brother Jack (Kue Lawrence) have been coping with Mom’s death primarily through stiff-upper-lip avoidance, turning their perception away from themselves, from their own pain, to focus on Amber’s increasing outbursts and more obvious displays of grief. She has in turn responded to Taylor removing all of Mom’s photos from the house by pouring her hurt into her sketchbook–a prolific artist with crayons and markers, her images of friendly characters and a happy homestead have lately morphed into nightmarish monsters and scenes of destruction, coupled with helpful annotations such as “BLOOD.” The school therapist understandably praises the fact that Amber has an outlet, or “outbox” as the film often puts it–better she puts her rage on the page “where it can’t hurt anyone,” than act on those feelings in more direct ways. But ah, what if those drawings could hurt people, and hurt them quite a bit? Our results are an infinitely better version of Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Sketch is primarily a fantasy in that Amblin-esque mold, the plot driver being the discovery of a mysterious pond in the woods that can boast an array of mystical properties–its origin is never addressed or explained, nor does it need to be. In addition to healing and mending broken things, the pool can turn products of make believe or creativity into realities … and when Amber’s sketchbook full of flying horrors, spider beasts and giant, googly-eyed giants falls into the water, well, this small town is going to be in for a really interesting few days. The results are a potent combination of wryly humorous, effectively emotional and even thrilling–a combination that is charming beyond belief.

Sketch’s successes begin with its sharp script, effective deployment of running gags (like Jack’s use of vocabulary he probably shouldn’t know, vexing adults in his radius), and propulsive direction and editing. I’m reminded of nothing so much as early, Cornetto-era Edgar Wright in Worley’s active camera and ability to mine physical humor out of everyday actions and activities. When Amber tells her father not to look in her forbidden, disturbing notebook, for instance, we might expect a scene of comedy in which a tempted and well-meaning Taylor tries to resist the impetus to sneak a peak, only to fail. Instead, Hale spills something on the notebook, and while still resisting the temptation to look inside, he attempts to dry it with a hairdryer so she won’t know, but drops both items. The upturned hair dryer then blows the notebook open and proceeds to flip rapidly through its pages, creating a flipbook effect that gives a shocked Taylor a glimpse of its horrors, leaving him shaken. The whole thing takes a few seconds, but it’s an infinitely more visually appealing way to depict “dad looks at the notebook,” and demonstrates Worley’s interest in engaging the audience at all times, even when there’s not a monster on screen.

And oh, the monsters! It’s quite a menagerie of crayon-colored beasties big and small, all rendered in extremely impressive digital FX on what was presumably a modest budget. In fact, has there ever been a better use case for CGI than “kid’s crayon drawings come to life”? Not only is it a visual that wouldn’t really be functional or attractive to render in a practical, physical way, the resulting squiggly art style–a skyscraper-sized blue giant with snake fingers and googly eyes, vomiting clouds of glitter–looks totally at home in the unreality of digital FX. The artists here have so much leniency in the design and fidelity of their CGI, because who’s to say how a living scribble should look? It helps Sketch avoid the uncanny valley entirely, making these weird monsters at times look more tangible than the distractingly uncanny baby Franklin Richards in the recent $200 million production of The Fantastic Four: First Steps. This aesthetic is the essence of “think smarter, not harder.”

Still, none of it would work if Sketch wasn’t anchored by wonderful performances, but it manages to put together one of the best groups of child actors I’ve ever seen on screen together. Every kid in this film has exceptional comic timing, particularly present in the banter and bickering between Amber and the insufferable Bowman (Kalon Cox), a classmate and jabbering “b-hole” who inspired many of her most violent drawings, featuring such punishments as “getting stabbed really hard through the stomach.” The most meaty performance of course belongs to Belle as Amber, given the guilt she is forced to confront in both her role in unleashing this plague of beasts, and her guilt over the resentments that created them in the first place; shame over what the act of drawing these things says about her and her character; fear that she has been irrevocably broken inside by her mother’s passing, and that what is left over is only the worst bits of her. Belle handles it all with aplomb, eventually confiding in her brother and father with a tenderness that is entirely earned and not the least bit saccharine. The only character who isn’t afforded quite enough definition is Good Place veteran D’Arcy Carden’s Liz, the sister of Terry who is mostly present in the screenplay to give him another adult to commiserate with. Carden is predictably hilarious, but the character has no particular footing of her own to stand on, not that this really matters in the end.

Sketch is a relentlessly entertaining triumph that captures a warm, Spielbergian élan with ease, at a moment when so many others are shooting the same shot and coming up empty. Funny, thrilling, brisk and equally compelling to practically any age group or demographic who appreciates adventure and whimsy, it’s an auspicious debut for Worley, and a family classic in the making. It deserves to be seen by as many families as possible when it hits theaters in early August.

Director: Seth Worley
Writer: Seth Worley
Stars: Tony Hale, Bianca Belle, Kue Lawrence, Kalon Cox, D’Arcy Carden
Release date: Aug. 6, 2025

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.

 
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