Manou the Swift

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.

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.

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.

A lovely little film, had some joyful emotion moments that gave me a fuzzy feeling inside! Loveable characters and good story, CGI was beautiful, slightly let down by inconsistencies, for example the start of the film in the day time the feathers of the gulls looked a little plastic and environments a little empty and yet towards the second half of the film suddenly improves to an amazing standard! Regardless of minor faults I really enjoyed the film and I only watched it to keep my girlfriend happy! Was pleasantly surprised when I ended up enjoying it so much! Defo worth a watch, it's nice to have a lighthearted family film with some deep moments once in a while! Check it out!! 9/10