Adored, acclaimed, awarded, French writer/director Jérémy Clapin’s first animated feature is also ill-conceived, pretentious and ‘RotoScoped.’ Well, perhaps not RotoScoped, the digital software system used is called Blender . . . it just looks RotoScoped. A two-track narrative that reveals itself as a single, parallel time-line fable, we follow a scatterbrained romantic kid who’s following (more like stalking) a young woman he failed to deliver a pizza to; and a disembodied right hand, sentient and on the lam in the big city, as it attempts to crawl its way back to . . . well, you’ll guess soon enough. And while we’re meant to admire/identify with the boy’s passion & fortitude, he’s largely defined by absentminded incompetence at all tasks, from dating to pizza delivery to woodworking. The last from an apprenticeship he serendipitously picks up with both hands (while he’s got ‘em) only because his putative boss is Uncle to the object of his affection. Unhelped by a drab palette & dull matte finish, the constant nudging to find charm in every adolescent hem, haw & its underlying ‘Go-For-It’ moralizing never resonates. Instead, this garçon seems to get pretty much what he deserves.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: Oscar®-nom’d, it lost to TOY STORY 4 (not seen here) against an oddly weak slate of animated features that saw a second foreign animation also nominated, also from NetFlix, also a big disappointment, KLAUS/’19. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/01/klaus-2019.html
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