With a pleasing picturebook animated style, meant to capture the look of Raymond Brigg’s popular graphic novel, this affectionate tribute to the author’s Mum & Dad, an exceptionally unexceptional middle-class couple, is ultimately too unexceptional. The early courtship is sweet, and the hardships of WWII (rationing, air-raid shelters, an only son sent to live in the country) hold interest. But by the last third of the film, we’re stuck in the kitchen with Dad ticking off changes in society he reads out loud from the newspaper and Mum tsk-tsking his devotion to Labour Party advances. (She seems to lean Tory more by class & manners than by political conviction.) The son’s journey seems more interesting: art school, an intellectual life beyond his parents’ ken, marriage to a quiet girl with schizophrenia, but the author modestly refuses attention. A U.K. bestseller, and you’ll see why; the film wasn’t picked up for Stateside theatrical distribution, and you’ll see why.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The heart of this film is better captured in Noël Coward’s THIS HAPPY BREED, filmed by David Lean in 1944 with a near perfect cast of exceptionally unexceptional types.
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