Abominable outspent the likes of The Addams Family ($4.19 million) and Ad Astra ($4.09 million). Significantly, though, Abominable’s ads registered the worst attention index in the top five, meaning that they were most often interrupted by viewers.

Echoing recent releases like Warner Animation’s Smallfoot and Laika’s Missing Link, Abominable tells the story of a yeti displaced from his habitat. When young Yi finds the creature on the roof of her Shanghai home, she names him Everest and resolves to reunite him with his family in the Himalayas. Cue an epic journey across China.

The film is a U.S./China co-production between Dreamworks and Pearl Studio, which started life as Oriental Dreamworks. In 2018, China’s CMC Capital Partners took full ownership of the studio, and relaunched it. Abominable is its first feature; it is working with an array of partners on forthcoming films, such as Glen Keane’s feature directorial debut Over the Moon, which is being produced for Netflix and animated at Sony Pictures Imageworks.

Last year, Pearl’s chief creative officer Peilin Chou told Cartoon Brew that Abominable marks “the first time a major global animated film will be set in modern-day China, and will feature modern-day Chinese teenagers.” This reflects the studio’s general pitch: it is positioning itself as a prestige production company with a special insight into the Chinese market, where animation is enjoying something of a boom.

Jill Culton, who previously co-directed Sony Picture Animation’s Open Season, is the writer and director behind Abominable, with Todd Wilderman (head of story on Dreamworks’s Home) serving as co-director. The producers are Suzanne Buirgy (Kung Fu Panda 2, Home) for Dreamworks, and Chou on behalf of Pearl Studio. Tim Johnson, Frank Zhu, and Li Ruigang are executive producing.

Reviews so far have been broadly positive, netting the film an 78% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. Here are some takes:

Kate Erbland at Indiewire gave the film a B- score:

Told in vivid colors and a great respect for the awe-inspiring power of big, floating things (lights and flowers and even a lovely interpretation of music itself), the timeline mechanics and real-world implications of their map-spanning adventure fade away in the face of such a charming story. Culton’s script slips in plenty of laughs.… The film’s many action sequences are zippy and well-constructed.

Over at The Hollywood Reporter, Jordan Mintzer identified one of the film’s main selling points:

[I]t’s a little too treacly and childish in places, with a storyline that goes exactly where you expect. But those drawbacks are somewhat compensated for by a series of arresting set-pieces, each one taking us to a spectacular Far East location not yet visited by this kind of high-powered Hollywood cartoon.

Variety’s Amy Nicholson was a little less enthusiastic:

The journey is wondrous for the characters, less compelling for the audience, who take several mental detours when the film calls back other kids’ movies people would probably rather be watching, including a scene with giant blueberries straight out of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

Peter Travers in Rolling Stone found things to appreciate, but felt that the film didn’t live up to its full potential: