This is film that got quite a lot of attention when it came out, but I will admit to being a little put of by the trailer, and as it didn’t stay in my local cinema for very long I never got around to seeing it. As it was part funded by the Beeb they must have gotten first dibs on the TV rights, coz they showed it today, don’t think it has been released on video/dvd yet although I may be wrong.
The film itself is an animated french tale of a boy and his grandmother, and the boy’s dog Bruno, basically the first part centres around the grandmother’s attempts to find out what the boy wants. I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that it’s a bike, and soon we skip forward a couple of years to see the grandson almost all grown up and taking part in the “Circuit de France”, a version of the Tour de France I presume. While in the middle of a stage he is kidnapped and taken to the US, where his grandmother and Bruno must follow in order to rescue him.
I must confess that my favourite part of this film is the dog, and I think they did a great job of caprtuing much of the essence of what makes a dog. The head slumped on the table trying to get a rub, the little barks and grunts that every dog-owner will understand.
Overall this is a highly enjoyable film, but prolly not to everyone’s taste. There is very little dialogue throughout. A couple of lines, two of which are in English the rest in French with no subtitles. What they say isn’t important however, as the animation manages to get more than enough regarding personality across. Another one to watch out for is the waiter. I thought he was sort of a cross between Basil Fawlty and the Monty Python waiter in The Meaning of Life who urges that after dinner mint on his customer “wafer thin” And I think that was John Cleese again??
Wonderfully weird
Official Site(flash, quicktime) | IMDb |
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