No, it's not part of the Jim Varney collection; just look at the year. I'm talking about an Academy Best Animated Feature nominee that, being foreign, went up against movies from the following year. That's almost all I knew when I chose to check it out.
It hadn't been long since my last French animation from the 2010s with talking animals, but that's about where the similarity ends. Unlike The Rabbi's Cat, E&C is indeed family friendly, having a basis in children's books. Probably the only reason for the PG rating is a handful of lines about ways to die. A sufficiently young viewer might cry over them, but I figure that if I could watch An American Tail many times around age 5, it's not that big a risk.
So how does E&C fare for older viewers? Let me begin my answer with "I WANT A CELESTINE DOLL! SHE'S ABSOLUTELY ADORABLE!" But since not everyone would decide on a movie for that reason alone, I'd better put more details below.
The animators cite inspiration from Studio Ghibli, and it shows. I especially thought of My Neighbors the Yamadas from the appearance, which involved computers but manages to look like little more than a watercolor flip book, in tribute to the original illustrations. Other Ghibli-esque elements include mild world building with goofy details, lush environments, and a pretty strong female lead.
The premises: In a human-free realm, bears live in a civilization a lot like our own, tho I've never seen a tooth shop before. Mice have a more different civilization underground, with quirky technology and even more obsessed with teeth. Their lower status reminded me a bit of the workers in Metropolis, minus the servitude. They tend to steal from bears despite ingrained terror. Bears, meanwhile, tend to fear mice the way we do. (Fun fact: The filmmakers invited real mice to the studio for study and soon got more than they bargained for.)
I should mention that the size contrast between bears and mice looks about on par with the contrast between humans and cats, no doubt to facilitate the interactions. I'm not certain that proportions remain constant throughout the film; it could be like Fantastic Mr. Fox, in which chickens appear to shift in size dramatically depending whether the consumer is human. Eh, best let it pass either way.
Celestine is a mouse old enough for a dental internship but young enough to hear bedtime stories at an orphanage; going by her voice actress in the English dub at least, figure no more than 13. Mouse society is too narrow in focus to accommodate her passion for drawing, and no one approves her performance in other matters. Ernest, voiced by a hardly recognizable Forest Whitaker, is an adult bear with a vaguely similar problem: Coming from a long line of judges, he pursued music and acting instead, only to wind up as a poor busker and notorious nuisance. (This may point to a decent lesson in accepting diversity of character.)
As you can imagine, mutual desperation draws them together, from a thoroughly unpromising start to a strained alliance that becomes a peculiar friendship. Heartwarming? Naturally. Funny? A fair amount of clean lowbrow. Sad? Just a tad. Happy in the end? Well, in theory....
Things gets notably forced in the third act in preparation for the happy ending. Improbable coincidences occur, adults act childish, and certain issues get glossed over. In particular, the explicit moral against prejudice gets diluted by the fact that Ernest and Celestine are not in trouble just for their cross-species friendship: They commit grand theft, among other crimes, enough to threaten the livelihoods of law-abiding others. Sure, they're desperate, but they express no remorse, and the resolution gives no hint that they won't do it again any time soon.
Therein lies the greater caveat for parents: You don't want your kids thinking it's OK to steal as long as they really want something and may get away with it. Of course, that brings us back to Fantastic Mr. Fox. As well as Aladdin and probably many other works that get shown to kids regularly. So perhaps the real moral is that, G or PG, you'd best not rely on unsupervised entertainment to teach impressionable minds.
If you can put that problem aside, E&C makes for a fun 80 minutes. It didn't stand a chance at the Oscar, but that has more to do with solid competition.
No comments:
Post a Comment