The Mitchells vs. the Machines review: The first great animated movie of 2021 is on Netflix on Friday.

Welcome to the highly specific golden age of animated movies about complicated father-daughter relationships. And in The Mitchells vs. the Machines, which arrives on Netflix on Friday, a technophobic dad frets about his daughter’s decision to major in filmmaking instead of choosing a more practical career path. At the last family dinner before her flight, she proudly unveils a new video she’s made, depicting herself as the family pug boarding a many-legged school bus as rainbows explode all around, but all Rick can see, or at least all he’s able to express, is that there’s a laptop on the table, where he’s forbidden them to be, and his daughter is preparing to devote her life to a dream he can only see ending in failure. PAL, voiced with delightful dudgeon by Olivia Colman, has some of the baffled outrage of a discarded parent, and André’s tech bro is barely more than a child himself—he clarifies one “when I was a young man” anecdote by adding “ … three years ago.” The tasks that he brags that his new fleet of robo-helpers can accomplish are all domestic chores: cook me breakfast, unpack these boxes, sweep up that mess. The ballast of Rick and Katie’s relationship allows the The Mitchells vs. the Machines to take some audacious swerves that might otherwise topple the whole enterprise, including a Dawn of the Dead-style mall battle in which the family is pursued by demonic smart appliances—and eventually a five-story Furby that breathes atomic fire like the rebooted Godzilla.