Kirikou and the Sorceress

The other day I got to see Kirikou and the Sorceress on TV after hearing good reviews of it. The story is based on an African folk tale that focuses on a young boy, Kirikou, and his village which is terrorised by a powerful sorceress. He learns that she has dried up the villager's water supply, eaten their men and stolen their gold, so he sets out to stop her.

French poster

Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kirikou_et_la_sorci%C3%A8re.jpg

A trailer/clip for the film can be found here.

To be honest I wasn't sure whether I was going to like this film as I'd seen another of the director Michel Ocelot's films, Tales of the Night, in the Summer and I wasn't a big fan of his style or pacing. I found myself having the same problem here - I'm just not used to folk tales being translated in this way with little character development, when you compare it to a Disney film, you can see how the time is spent furthering the character and emotion, rather than crafting situations. Ocelot seems too focused on conveying a message and here it seems to be how people, despite the good you do for them, are all too eager to hurt. It was a different, more mature message than I'd expect from a children's film and while I admire this, it seemed to weigh down the tone for me too much, lacking humour. This might just stem from the translation, but still it seems to lack fun. 

The animation is a lot smoother than Tales of the Night making it easier to connect to the characters and the story, while retaining Ocelot's style. Although it's an interesting perspective, I'm still not a fan of the camera moving in a linear way, showing the action happening horizontally across the screen. It's not dynamic enough for me, lacking energy, but you can see Ocelot's theatre orientation from this as it captures the same view point. In a story where the environments are constantly changing though, it seems a bit restrictive.

Generally though, I thought that Kirikou was ok. The characters are distinctive in their designs, but they're not developed and the film has a great message but no emotional attachment to me at least, apart from perhaps increasing annoyance at the village children who won't listen to Kirikou. But Ocelot sticks to his style and I commend him for that. It takes a lot of courage to make a children's film where nudity features frequently and often the background designs are beautiful. It bridges a nice gap between reality and fantasy, bringing more weight to the moral aspects of the story. The animation can't be faulted in terms of technical details, but sometimes the style of animation changes from realistic movement to overzealous almost cartoony action, which doesn't always match the tone of the film and consequently sticks out a bit. I'd recommend it though for animation fans, just to study a different style of design as at only 74mins long, it's worth a watch.