The Last Mimzy

Teacher in Meadow: "Today, I'm going to show you a story. Let's all tune in together. A long time ago, the soul of our planet was sick. People had become isolated...warlike. Our world was frightened. It was dying. But a great scientist was trying to save us. He had tried many times, and knew he could only try once more. This was the last Mimzy."

A 2007 film centered around Noah Wilder, a video game-loving, somewhat irritable young man who believes that "school sucks, life sucks, and [he] suck[s]", and his sensitive and precocious younger sister Emma. While on vacation with their parents over spring break, Noah and Emma find a box filled with strange objects that are incomprehensible to them except for a stuffed rabbit named Mimzy that can communicate with Emma. Sensing that there is something odd about their find, they keep it a secret from their parents, particularly after Noah tries to show a translucent rock filled with constantly shifting green triangles to his mother and it appears to her to be a normal rock. Emma becomes emotionally attached to Mimzy as the mysterious objects begin to give the siblings psychic abilities and increase their mental capacities to genius level. Noah's science teacher Larry and his mystic wife Naomi get involved when Larry notices that Noah has been drawing mandalas, and the situation becomes serious when Noah accidentally assembles the objects into a generator that causes a blackout in the entire city of Seattle. The FBI discovers the source of the surge and the Wilder family members are arrested; meanwhile, Emma has elucidated that Mimzy and the other objects were sent from the future, and it is up to her and Noah to figure out how to send Mimzy back to her own time and save humanity's future.

Loosely adapted from the 1943 science fiction short story "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Lewis Padgett.

Tropes used in The Last Mimzy include:

• Adaptation Decay: The film is loosely based upon the short story "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, writing under the joint pseudonym of Lewis Padgett, which is regarded as a classic of golden age science fiction. Some of the story's general plot elements were left intact, but many key details were removed or dumbed-down and the original dark ending was replaced with a fluffy environmental aesop.
• Adults Are Useless: "I showed the green glass thing to Mom. She thought it was a paperweight." Indeed, by the end of the film, the adults--except for Larry and Naomi--are little more than hindrances to Noah and Emma.
  • To be fair, they thought they were helping out by throwing away the objects and Mimzy, especially since all they knew was that it made Emma have a seizure.
• All Myths Are True: Particularly Tibetan ones about mandalas.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Noah and Emma use the generator to build a bridge across spacetime to send Mimzy back to the future.
• You Fail Biology Forever: There is no DNA in tears.
  • Strands of DNA do not float around freely in tears, and tears are mostly water and salt, but a few cells are probable, especially after said tears have rolled down a person's face. Quickly locating and extracting DNA from those cells is only impossible with current biotechnology.
• You Fail Law Forever: SWAT teams storm the house. They corral everyone in the living room. But the little girl in this family you were told to contain with extreme prejudice asks to get something out of her room? Of course she can go up unsupervised.
• Aw, Look -- They Really Do Love Each Other: Noah is quite abrasive to Emma at first, but by the end of the movie they are getting along swimmingly, and Noah ends up saving Emma's life.
• Bad Bad Acting: The child actors who play Noah and Emma are excellent, but the parents' acting is painful at times.
• Big No: Emma's reaction when her mom tries to make her throw away Mimzy. Thankfully, Noah rescues Mimzy and the toys from the dumpster later.
• Brick Joke: Larry White's dream-visions of winning lottery numbers and mandalas.
• By the Eyes of the Blind: Emma is the only one who can understand Mimzy.
• Cheerful Child: Emma, though not obnoxiously so.
• The Chosen One: Emma. However, she needs Noah in order to carry out her duties as Chosen One.
  • It's revealed that there were other Chosen Ones that received the Mimzies in their respective time periods, but they didn't have Engineers to build the necessary bridge to get Mimzy back to the future.
• Coming of Age Story: For Noah, to a degree.
• Companion Cube: When Emma gets attached to Mimzy, she starts carrying her everywhere. Emma even becomes very distressed when separated from Mimzy for any length of time.
• Crapsack World: The future from which Mimzy comes.
• Everything's Better with Plushies: Mimzy, of course.
• Hair-Raising Hare: Mimzy near the end because of the message that she brings.
  • Everythings Better With Bunnies: But she's so cute!
• Hey, It's That Guy!: Dwight from The Office is the science teacher Larry White.
• Humans Are Psychic in the Future: Well, not the Crapsack World future from which Mimzy was sent, but an even later future in which a teacher tells the story of Emma and Noah to an assembled class.
  • Justified because Emma gains psychic powers from the objects from the future and then gives some of her DNA to Mimzy. Said DNA was then used to "cure" the sick people of the future, and presumably was responsible for their new abilities.
• Invisible to Adults: The objects aren't actually invisible to adults, but Mimzy appears to be a normal stuffed animal at first glance and the awesome shifting green glass triangle thing looks like...a paperweight.
• The Men in Black: The FBI agents who storm the Wilder house.
• Multiple Head Case: Noah's science teacher brings a two-headed snake named Charlie to class.
• Product Placement: Actually fits well into a very clever moment. When the bunny is examined closely it is discovered to be made of microprocessors -- Intel microprocessors. This is obviously met with much shock by the lab as Intel can't do anything like this... yet.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Mimzy.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: This is the intention of the scientist who created Mimzy.
• Shout-Out: To Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures Underground."
• The Unintelligible: Mimzy. The audience can hear her make a humming sound, but only Emma can actually understand her.
• Time Travel
• Weirdness Censor: What Mrs. Wilder tries to invoke (after Noah and Emma get Psychic Powers, she spends half the movie plugging her ears and going "la-la-la, my kids aren't magic, the paranormal doesn't exist").