Manou à l'école des goélands

Stunning animation and beautiful artwork but a good story concept that suffered poor a script. The pace was all wrong, the dialogue was terrible and the characters had shaky development, and even the voice acting was surprisingly weak.

But a proven concept of skill and talent in art and animation for Haas and Block.

It was nice to see a slow-moving but sweet and interesting topic from an unfamiliar animation studio, LUXX production (which is based in Germany, but apparently the original vocals are in English?). It managed to weave a lot of great information on birds into the plot without forcing it too much. And the French Riviera setting was beautiful, and entirely from the perspective of the birds - humans play only a very marginal role.

Sebastian's Review: 8 Stars Sienna's Rating: 7 Stars Paul's Rating: 7 Stars.

The first 5 mins is clever and cute, visually impressive and inventive, the world from inside an egg, and then it just falls into bog standard badly written tropes about fitting in and finding yourself, crowbarring in problems (don't flap your wings, you should be able to swim even though your feet are claws etc etc) to make a story that isn't really there. The animation was pretty good, especially the light and background scenery, but the over long race scene outstays it's welcome as the animation team run you through every trick they can think of till it became annoying. The A list voice cast failed to engage. I could see what they were going for but they phoned it in, and really the characters on paper weren't that interesting so they didn't have much to work with.

It is the French coast, Nice. Manou's egg ends up on the ground and cracked. He manages with his little wings to crawl up a rock and finds a nesting pair of Gulls. Mama Gull takes him under her wing, the pair end up raising this small Swift as if he were a Gull, along with his Gull brother that hatches shortly.

But he can never be a Gull, he can't soar, he eventually accepts his fate and acts like a Swift. His big moment comes when the migratory group encounter bad weather and he leads them to safety.

So, other than a cute cartoon it has a message of acceptance of those who are not like you. And that discarded individuals should not give up, there is a place for everyone if we find our real talents.

It was fun to watch but pretty innocuous. We watched it at home on DVD from our public library.

This was hands down the worst animated movie I've rented at Redbox. I don't know how they managed to get both William Daffoe and Kate Winslet in this movie. The script was garbage. Literally half the script was birds sticking their tounges out at each other and saying "It's a swift thing." The scenery animation was good, but the bird animation was early 2000's work. The first fifteen minutes of the movie has a plot, and then the rest of it barely resembles any plot at all. Don't waste your money or your children's brain cells with this.