The film jumps into its easy story. Little Juliette is about to show 5, and is distributed with her eight-year previous sister Carmen on the weekend of her birthday to the house of her mom’s pal Agnès, who wrote a well-liked collection of youngsters’s fantasy books about “The Kingdom of Winds” through which a sorcerer named Sirocco (who has one seen eye and clothes like a mid-Twentieth century impresario) holds sway by controlling air streams. An encounter with an enchanted toy sweeps them into the storybook world, the place they morph into cats (a design that ideas its hat to the little boy in Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are“) and get right into a collection of adventures and misadventures sparked by an accident that angers The Mayor of a neighborhood (a giant, goofy, considerably blank-faced goblin-type) and turns the ladies into public enemies. As punishment for his or her mistake, the Mayor palms Juliette over to the opera singer that he idolizes, Selma, and tells Carmen that she’ll should marry the Mayor’s dumb-as-box-of-rocks son. Solely the wizard Sirocco (just like the Wizard of Oz earlier than him) can assist them escape this terrible state of affairs and return residence.
It is exhausting to explain the simplicity and perfection of the imagery on this film in a method that captures its calming, centering impact on the viewer. Chieux and his group of a whole lot of artists use a wide-and-narrow body to create enveloping panoramas but in addition extra summary tableaux which are depending on repeated shapes and strong colours. And I do imply strong. This can be a film that appears and feels substantive, like a factor that was truly drawn or painted, or made, on paper or a standard cel, fairly than being comprised of weightless ones and zeroes in a pc. There’s a bit little bit of shading right here and there, however for probably the most half the film’s colour palette is so regimented that a number of the compositions look as in the event that they’re constructed from mosaic tiles, or the ovoid or round glass items utilized in Turkish lampshades.
There is no commonplace design to the magical beings within the film, simply as there weren’t in “Implausible Planet” or “Yellow Submarine.” It is a polyglot, a potluck, and all of the extra playful for that cause. The opera singer Selma has points of the water-drinking chook and doubtless a half-dozen basic toys. There are creatures that seem like they got here out of a Miyazaki film (together with a spider-legged creature that might be a cousin of the soot creatures in “Spirited Away“) and landscapes which may’ve been pieced collectively from overlapping items of carefully-cut building paper. The story is usually “these ladies wish to get again residence,” however there is a buried layer of secondary inferences and meanings which may not be observed by younger kids, such because the theme of reworking grief into artwork (the creator of the Sirocco books has modeled the character of Selma on her sister, and it appears as if it is her method of bringing her again, should you catch my which means). It is a delicate film in each method, even in its daring imagining of characters and landscapes.
