FRENCH CARTOONS

Last week, I reviewed a pair of animated features at the Film Experience. In the best of all possible worlds, I'd be writing fresh reviews for both of them for this blog that ran up to my usual 1500+ words I like to spit out for animation, but we do not live in that world. Instead, please allow me to repost these articles for those of you who don't follow my work at the Film Experience, presented with only the slightest editorial adjustment.

April and the Extraordinary World - originally reviewed 3 August

As even the quickest look at a box office report shows, 2016 has been a great year for the popularity of animated films. But outside of the heavyweight American studio tentpoles, there have been genuine treasures that have still managed to slip through the cracks. Thus it's my pleasure to introduce to you the crackling Franco-Canadian-Belgian sci-fi fantasy April and the Extraordinary World, new to DVD, thanks to the endlessly wonderful folks at distributor GKIDS.

The film takes place in an alternate world where Emperor Napoleon III of France died in a lab explosion in 1870, just before our history had him falling from grace in the eyes of the French legislature; here, his son ascends as Napoleon IV and ushers in a bold new era of European diplomacy that manages to prevent both of the 20th Century's World Wars, but also results in an era of scientific stultification, meaning that by 1931, when the film proper begins, the world is still in an age of steam.

Here we meet young April, whose parents are working on a serum to prolong life. After they are killed, the latest in a long line of great thinkers to be removed from the world under mysterious circumstances, April takes up their research, and in 1941, finally cracks the secret of their serum, aided by a sarcastic talking cat (an inheritance from her parents' experiments). Thus putting her under the watchful eyes of the French authorities, but also some other even more terrifying power.

Steampunk is a well-established subgenre of science fiction in books and comics (it means, basically, "what would modern inventions look like if they were made with Victorian technology?"), but it only rarely gets its due in the movies, which is not least of the reasons why April and the Extraordinary World is so delightful. The design, based upon a graphic novel French comic book artist Tardi, is richly fanciful, presenting an evocative world full of grey soot and elaborate metalwork, looking something like post-apocalyptic Art Nouveau. One can easily take the comparison too far, but the film more than slightly resembles the work of Hayao Miyazaki, particularly in his Castle in the Sky/Howl's Moving Castle phase: the world-building involves the same mixture of fantasy and costume drama; the story blurs science-fiction and historical romance in much the same way. It even throughout in a bit of Expressionism and film noir in some of the more dramatic moments.

All of which is to say that April and the Extraordinary World lives up to its title: the idiosyncratic, detailed, and imaginative setting is all by itself enough to make this possibly the year's most special-looking animated feature. Which is all well and good, but it's at least as gratifying that it also presents such an enjoyable adventure narrative, anchored by a fantastic protagonist in the form of April herself. Part of this is how unique she is: not all that many movies make a sense of scientific curiosity and creativity the main characteristic of their lead character, and even fewer of them do that when the lead is also a woman. But she's also graced with a really excellent vocal performance in the original French, by Marion Cotillard (replaced by Canadian singer Angela Galuppo in the English dub), who gives the character a hard, sharp attitude, and generally makes her more complicated and interesting than one expects from an animated protagonist.

Besides that, the film simply has a really great story and it tells it really well. Animators turned first-time directors Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci keep the film moving at a quick clip, all the better to keep us at full attention, and also to deprive us of a chance to think too hard about what's going on. The plot takes some particularly strange turns in its second half, pushing It from low-key adventure (or anyway, as low-key as anything so beholden to steampunk could possibly manage to be) into full-blown pulp sci-fi, and it's one of the film's great strengths to plow throw those twists so fast that by the time we can stop to wonder if they make any sense, we've already gotten used to them.

More than anything else, though, the pacing gives April and the Extraordinary World the feeling of a great swashbuckler. It is, first and foremost, an exceptionally fun movie, starting with its playful credits and moving all the way through the untrustworthy handsome boys, flying houses, and camera-wielding rats that April encounters on the way. It's all a gratifyingly straightforward adventure, given particular energy by the old-fashioned animation choices used to bring it to life, and it's every bit the equal to all of the bigger family movies that have made so much more noise this year.

8/10

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The Little Prince - originally reviewed 5 August

It is the end of a long, baffling journey to American audiences for The Little Prince, an English-language French-made animated feature that has been waiting since the 2015 Cannes Film Festival for this moment. A substantial hit in most of the markets where it opened across 2015, the film was scheduled for release in the United States on March 18, 2016, but for reasons still unknown, distributor Paramount got cold feet at the very last minute, and cancelled the release entirely on March 11. A few days later, Netflix rode to the movie's rescue, and now the film has finally started streaming (alongside a perfunctory New York/Los Angeles release to qualify it for awards consideration).

To say that it's been worth the effort is wildly insufficient: The Little Prince turns out to be a wonderfully beguiling, visually inventive animated feature that easily ranks among the year's best (given the Academy’s anti-Netflix bias, I can't imagine the film actually secure a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination, though I can easily imagine it being better than all five movies that do). It admirable pays tribute to the philosophical playfulness and melancholy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's legendary children's-book-that's-secretly-for-adults which forms its base and provides the title, though I'm not sure we can actually call it an "adaptation". It's more of a tribute to the experience of reading the book and attempting to grapple with its solemn message than it is a straight narrative retelling, which proves to be a very successful way of handling the material. At any rate, it's an obvious labor of love for director Mark Osborne, whose great affection for the book and desire to share it underpins everything that happens in the movie.

Taking place in what I suppose is suburban France (almost all of the writing we see is in French, anyway), The Little Prince centers on a little girl (Mackenzie Foy) who has been studying with indescribably intensity to get into a highly prestigious private school. To further this end, her mother (Rachel McAdams) has organized summer into a joy-free zone of constant, regimented work. All of this is complicated by the old aviator (Jeff Bridges) who lives next door to the house the mother and daughter have just purchased; he takes a much freer, more imagination-focused idea of childhood, and when he accidentally ends up involved in the little girl's life, he starts to tell her a story of another young person he has known. This was a little prince (Riley Osborne) who traveled from a small asteroid to the Sahara, where he met the aviator, and, well, the rest is one of the bestselling books of the 20th Century.

Sight unseen, the addition of a framework narrative seemed like a surefire mistake; it has, on the contrary, turned into an enormous success. Screenwriters Irena Brignull and Bob Persichetti have infused their original material with a perfect modern-day interpretation of Saint-Exupéry's musings about the gap between adult sense and childhood creativity, turning the film into a gentle but unyielding satire on the modern tendency towards micro-managed childhood schedules and the belief that the purpose of an education is to become a productive member of a capitalist society, rather than to learn for the pure joy of learning. This is all achieved with a keen sense of humor rather than a clucking sense of disapproval: Osborne, has an excellent sense of comic timing in animation, and The Little Prince is full of carefully-chosen camera angles (including several unexpected and clever birds-eye view shots) and slightly delayed character reactions to let the film's jokes bubble up organically rather than fling them at us like he's firing a gag cannon (as in, for example, the same director's Kung Fu Panda; a terrifically funny film, but not so warm and knowing in its comedy).

The film that results from this has its cake and eats it: it's a contemporary-style CGI feature that has the stately pacing and sincere sensibility of a much more delicately handicrafted piece of animated art. Which, for the record, it also is: the interludes dedicated to the original book bring it to life in the form of almost indescribably beautiful paper animation, with characters molded from paper clay. It's an inventive way of putting us inside the pages of the book, and it provides an important contrast between the slick, glossy CGI textures (which are, at times, not great: the aviator in particular feels made of plastic, not flesh, especially his eerily unmoving beard) and the more idiosyncratic book sequences, which are thus both aesthetically and stylistically set apart from the hyper-modern culture that the film opposes to steadfastly.

Besides, they're extraordinarily beautiful: if The Little Prince had nothing to offer but the effect of translucent colored paper aglow from backlighting, that would be quite sufficient for me to declare it a great animated movie. It even makes its not-too-expensive CGI look beautiful, stylizing it just enough that it feels usefully unreal - the glowering, corpselike school board deciding the little girl's fate at the beginning of the movie, for example, or the rigid boxes and ninety-degree objects that dominate the anonymous suburb where the little girl is to learn all about how to be a productive, generic member of society.

There are a few missteps along the way, including a lengthy stretch in the second half where the film tries to essentially write a sequel to the original book, and turns a bit too much into a generic kids action movie, though it manages to recover in the final scenes. And besides, even this rather unlikable part of the movie boasts some amazing dark fantasy design concepts, recalling Osborne's great Oscar-nominated short More. Beyond that, I can't think of any place the film puts it foot wrong: besides the pleasant humor and intelligent use of the medium, it boasts likable, distinctive characters (even with their absence of proper names). It's perhaps too overinvested in the "in my day..." attitude towards childhood play for all tastes, but it's nonetheless a handsome and sweet tribute to childhood imagination that deserves far more than direct-to-streaming purgatory.

8/10