Manou the Swift

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.

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 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.

Manou the Swift or Swift is an animated story about a swift named Manou (voiced by Josh Keaton) who is raised by seagulls and struggles to fit in. He then goes through a journey in discovering his true identity.

Swift benefits from a feel-good story as you can see the struggles of growing up and trying to identify with a group who you do not feel a part of. I enjoyed some of the relationships Manou had such as with his brother Luc (voiced by Mikey Kelly) and his love interest Khalifa (voiced by Cassandra Steen).

Where the film lacks is the animation and storyline. The storyline, while feel-good, does nothing to differentiate itself from other stories in the past. While I did enjoy it, I didn't feel like it wasn't something I had not seen before. Furthermore, aside from Manou learning his identity, there is no other major plot point. It feels a lot longer than it should be despite only being 90 minutes. In addition, this is a lower budget animated film and it does show. It feels like a made-for-tv animated film. I would rate this slightly under average - 4/10.

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.