Chapter 11

Boss Baby: An Oscar study [PART TWO – Narrative/Plot]

It’s Week Two of The Boss Baby Oscar study, and today we will be talking about the plot of the movie, and try to figure out just exactly what is going on in the movie’s story.

I would like to inform everyone that there will be SPOILERS in this post. If, for some reason you actually want to watch The Boss Baby, do not read past this sentence.

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The basic plot of The Boss Baby is simple: A baby working in the war of babies against puppies comes to the narrator, Tim’s house, and they must work together to stop the puppy takeover.

The longer version of the plot is much harder to explain. The story is told with an unreliable narrator, who is voiced by Tobey Maguire. It is revealed at the end of the movie that he is narrating to his daughter as an adult, but in many of the scenes shown it is hard to tell exactly what is going on. He said himself that he had an overactive imagination, and many scenes in the movies show this.

In the beginning of the movie after the parents sing the one song the movie paid for: “Blackbird” by the Beatles, they ask their son, Tim, if he’d be okay with having a sibling. Immediately he said no, but then went to bed wondering where babies come from. This then started the title card sequence where the Boss Baby is shown for the first time on a conveyer belt full of other babies.

The next day the baby arrives by himself in a taxi. This is not a normal thing, and it’s pretty obvious that things are a little off, because when Tim goes downstairs, the parents are introducing him to his new brother.

This part makes me wonder: is this entire movie just Tim’s imagination? None of the adults seem aware of the things happening in the movie, so it would make sense if it was all a dream.

I don’t want to write out the whole plot to show what I mean, so I’ll just list some points in the movie that seem even more bizarre than normal:

• Baby arrives in a taxi w/o parents
• Baby wears a suit, no one questions it but Tim
• Mom is shown as pregnant for one minute after saying goodnight, and next day the baby is here
• That one pacifier scene. Just the entire scene
• Adults seem unaware of anything
• Dogs are stealing parent’s love from babies (this is the main plot of the movie)
• The “nanny” that the CEO of PuppyCo. supplied for the parents to watch Tim and the baby
• Bachelorette party gives Tim a Long Island Ice Tea in Las Vegas
• A plane full of only Elvis impersonators
• That big baby is literally the juggernaut. He got thrown into a car and shrugged it off
• Cloning a Super Dog that makes parents love it more than their own kids
• Making Super Dogs in general

• The CEO of PuppyCo. remembers being BigFatBoss Baby, and that is the reason he wants to get rid of babies.
• The whole villain’s plan is to completely get rid of babies
• The entire Las Vegas scene (was that part even real?)
• The constant business lingo that probably went over kid’s heads
• The baby doesn’t even have a name for most of the movie
• Seriously who gives a kid alcohol?

After the day is saved, the baby leaves the family and returns to work, making the parents “forget about the baby”. Those little creatures that make them forget are terrifying.

They both later reconcile their differences, and Tim welcomes the baby back in to the family. The scene plays almost exactly as the first time the baby shows up, and the baby is introduced as “Theodore Lindsey Templeton”. The baby was the same age as before, and he was just a normal baby again.

If the entire movie was a dream, did the movie occur in 9 months? Time makes no sense in this movie, so it’s hard to tell. How ever this timeline works in the movie, one thing’s for sure: there was way too much baby butt shown in this movie. The animators had to design and animate this movie. I feel sorry for them the most.

Next week we’ll talk about the “behind the scenes” aspects of The Boss Baby, and how animated films like this one even get nominated for an Academy Award.