When it comes to characters, “Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds” is one of the most pleasant painted story books human animation can offer and, hopefully, will not lose to other media. Paper & Soul is directed and co-written by French filmmaker Benoît Chieux (with writing partner Alain Gagnol), and produced in Koproduktion with Belgium and France. The animated children’s adventure film speaks of scope and ambition when it can cut its influences from “Yellow Submarine” and “Fantastic Planet” and “The Wizard of Oz” through to the works of dr. Seuss and the complete works of Hayao Miyazaki. But neither does it offer any clearbed ahistorical re-enactments or nostalgia bait; such factors would too broad and foolish. I might be wrong, but I suspect American re-distribution company GKids felt there was a flaw in the reasoning that a film that was gentle, slow – gliding even – on the screen would need to be classified as a two day “artseeing” event at AMC Theaters. For the screening I went to yesterday, there were indeed many children and they looked very fascinated while watching this screen portrayal. It has that quality of a fairytale that promises an enchanting ending. It is uplifting and awakening – the eyes and the ears and the intellect.
The film dives right into its uncomplicated plot. Little Juliette is turning five years old and she is being taken with her eight years older sister Carmen an acquaintance of her mother known as Agnès, author of an acclaimed series of children’s fantasies about ‘The Winds Kingdom’ whose story is about a sorcerer Infact Sirocco features as a handsome middle aged man dressed as an impresario of the 1950s with only one eye out. One of the magical cliched encounter where they meet a toy designed to elicit magic drags them into the illustrated book corner and the girls become kitties (one of the designs inspired by Federica the boy in Maurice Sendaks Where the wild things are) only to get caught into a number ofaction and reaction that results when a supporting character (an overstuffed handsome gobulin with no brain) The Mayor gets mad. And makes the girls wanted against the public. For this blunder the girls made, the Mayor decides to retrain Juliette by letting her stay with her favourite diva, Selma and informs her sister Carmen that she will be married to the Mayor’s dumber than dunder son. Like the Wizard from Oz, only wizard Sirocco can turn out to be the last hope in terms of their returning home after such a catastrophe.
It’s daunting to try to express the clarity and beauty of the visuals in this film that is so soothing and puts the viewer in balance. Chieux and the hundreds of artists he works with do play around with a wide-and-narrow frame and so create all enveloping picturesque landscapes and more. Abstract ones too. These ones rely on a recurrence of shapes and solid colors. Yes I mean solid. This is a film that looks and feels proper weighty, like something that’s been actually drawn or painted or built up from a piece of paper or a proper cel rather than being composed of the shimmering ones and zeroes in a computer that’s afloat in the digital sphere. There is a bit of edge here and there but for the most part the kuros’ found surface painting colours are so strict that some of the compositions appear as constructed of mosaic tiles or the oval or round pieces of glass commonly applied to turkish lampshade.
Neither defining design was present in the film paradigmatic figures as in the case of “Fantastic Planet” or “Yellow Submarine.” Your ‘multilanguage’ was also included in zniszczenie במדולין . It’s a babel—intelligent and more fun because all patchwork. Selma from the opera has something in her of a water nice drinking bird and maybe several classic dolls.
There are strange characters that seem as though they belong in a Miyazaki film, even a spider-like thing which might be a relative to the soot creatures seen in “Spirited Away.” Also the backgrounds that look like they are made by various pieces of cut and layered crafts. The plot goes basically, “these girls want to go home,” and they return with such thoughts; but, if one paid attention, there is an additional layer of barbaric subtext and subplots that children will not be able to grasp, for instance the idea of grief-stricken artist (the writer of Sirocco books has based Selma’s character on her sister, and I have an impression it is her way to cope with the loss). It’s that kind of a movie where everything is darned creative – the characters, their imaginative lands and buildings and everything else.
We have started being conditioned to believe that animated films are supposed to be created in a very strict range of art styles in order for them to be worthy of a commercial release : you know, that “ three dee” animation which either errs towards the absolutely, patently photographic, and what is the point of that actually, or more commonly, makes most of its characters look like vignettes or dolls with giant heads and over sped up arms and over the top facial cues, the “DreamWorks Head” being the epitome of grossness and all these finished off with the most overused and obvious pop tunes which usually spoon fed into the viewing audience quite overtly.
It occurred to me, about halfway through “Sirocco,” that its subheading might be descried as “mental palate cleanser.” It does remove all the limitations that the corporate tree of the cartoon animation tries to impose over the movie watching mind, and places the mind out there to soar in the skies again.
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