Review: Cancer season arrives at the cellular level in Unstoppable

The strange world of the inside of the human body has been a prime playground for animated adventures throughout the year. A classic of my childhood was the episode of The Magic School Bus when the class went inside Ralphie, one of their sick classmates, to figure out why he wasn't feeling well. There is, of course, Osmosis Jones, which is a glaring animated blind spot for me. A couple years back, Yumi's Cells: The Movie adapted the popular web comic into an animated feature which played a bit like Inside Out.

Since we're nearing the halfway point of the year, I've been looking around for movies I might have missed from the past few months, and one I came across is Unstoppable, a Norwegian feature (I watched the English-language version) that follows in the footsteps of the afore-mentioned microscopic animated works. It carves its own fun, weird little niche in the super-specific sub-genre, providing a colorful, somewhat educational, and overall delightful spin on what's happening inside of us.

Kaja (pronounced "Kaya") is a little pink cell with dreams of joining her comrades in their journey to the lymph nodes. Their leader, Malignus, promises that the nodes are a promised land where the cells will be able to divide (and divide again and again) to their heart's content. Some of Kaja's fellow cells, mostly the spiky purple ones, have already started dividing, making their current home increasingly cramped. But the journey is imminent, and Kaja is raring to go, along with her fellow pink cells who make up a sort of makeshift family.

Kaja's dreams are struck down when Malignus's arch advisor tells her that she and her kin aren't going on the journey after all, since they all lack the ability to divide. But they receive an alternate mission: if they instead brave the weird wilderness of the human body to go to the bronchi and retrieve some little purple vials that make dividing easier (or in Kaja's case, possible at all), they'll be welcome to join the rest of the group in the lymph nodes. Kaja ends up setting off by herself, the only one brave (desperate?) enough to undertake such a perilous adventure.

What isn't immediately clear (but is revealed quite early) is that Kaja is living inside a tumor inside an 8 year-old boy named Erik. When we meet Erik, he's checking in at the hospital, ready to undergo a bout of chemotherapy before going under the knife to get the tumor removed. There's the ticking clock for Kaja's adventure, and also the origin for her unlikely companion: the chemo appears in Erik's body as a squadron of blue-skinned soldiers donning futuristic tech: armor, helmets, firearms. Their mission is to keep the cancer cells contained in the tumor until it's removed, in the hopes of stopping the spread of the illness to other parts of the body.

During this mission, Captain Abel's head is lopped clean off, and Kaja discovers it on her way out of the tumor. Abel has an understanding of the human body. Kaja has legs. So they become an odd-couple duo and set off to the bronchi, though they're understandably wary of each other.

Unstoppable has that educational bent to it, in that along the way, you learn a bit about the human body and how it works. You learn about cells, enzymes, and other structures that keep you ticking. Obviously, it's all done with this entertaining cartoony filter put over it, but it's great for a movie to delve into material like this in a way that might get young viewers curious to learn more. Who knows? Maybe a kid will watch this movie and decide to become a doctor.

It's a lot of fun to see how the film depicts the insides of the body, rendering these spaces and structures as strange alien landscapes. There's a variety of shapes and structures, and a plethora of colors. The neural pathways have glowing orbs of electricity coursing along them; if you get swept up in one, you'll end up in a totally different part of the body. (Our heroes ride one to the place where ideas are formed and deployed, a king of willow tree/fireworks show space that feels like something you might find in Inside Out). There's so much creativity to how this film explores these inner workings, and some really cute and clever moments.

Kaja and Abel are a winning pair, because they grow to care about each other so much despite all the reasons they shouldn't. Abel is desperate to help Kaja see the light, that she should submit to the enzymes in the hope of not becoming a full-on cancer cell. Kaja is torn between the dreams she's always had and the gradually dawning truth. She didn't even know she was inside a human body, or what a human is. But as Abel explains (and even shows) her who Erik is and what he's dealing with, Kaja's empathy kicks in, and her seemingly straightforward adventure takes on some wrinkles.

Along the way, the film occasionally pops out to the human world, where we see the realities of Erik's cancer battle: the monotony, the sickness (we see him hunched over the toilet following the chemo), the endless waiting. He befriends a little girl who's a prisoner of the waiting room until her surgeon mother gets off work. This human element enhances the stakes of the story, literally giving us the "big picture" within which this microscopic story is playing out.

I had such a fun time seeing how Unstoppable plays out, and how it manages to weave some learning moments (both about the workings of the human body and about *life*) into its silly and odd adventure. It certainly earns its spot alongside the classics of the animated innards canon.