Manou à l'école des goélands

I really liked the movie and my kids love it. It is maybe not for older ones, but young children really enjoy it. And for me it was no waste of time, great design. I got a great feeling of the cote d'azure. The look is amazing and worth it alone.

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.

I'm no CGI artist, I have no idea how they do it, but some of the scenes in this movie are absolutely beautiful. On my 4k TV it looked real, breathtaking.

Unfortunately that's the end of the good. It's all downhill. The actual bird animations were very very cheap, pardon the pun. In some parts you can clearly see how they couldn't manage to animate what they wanted to so shot a different angle or used shadows. Terrible.

The sound was awful. The music didn't fit. In most movies the music is almost unnoticeable, you don't realise the ambience it's creating, it's part of the movie. Here, it's clunky, as if they only had 2 hours left to throw it in at the end, and no budget left either.

The acting... I'm confused. I know the two main stars can act, but here... It was awful. As if they've walked into the studio, read their lines, and the directors gone "yep, cut, thanks for that." And then all the parts have been shoehorned in, with terrible pauses between lines. No emotion, no timing, no conversation.... Just a collection of clips that don't work together. It doesn't even sound like they're in the same room.

This will never become a classic, it will be in the bargain bucket or the bin.

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.

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.