De tre musketerer

So far the longest and biggest animation of the best Latvian cartoon makers. Everybody has seen some movie about three musketeers, but, be assured, this, you haven't seen yet! The original story of musketeers is there, but, it's told in a very different way. There's good sense of humor used a lot, maybe even a bit too much, but, it's not getting worse, as you watch it. The music is well used and has a nice touch of Latvian traditional music to it. This animation probably will not be fully understood by kids - but it's great fun for both kids and adults alike. Basically this is the type of animation, that the producers of it have been making for years for Latvia (the name of the series is Avarijas Brigade - and it's as good as Three Musceteers!). It's animation of puppets, all movie is made of them (the same technique as Wallace & Gromit), but it's a bit more adult oriented then it.

Just about the cutest film I've ever seen. Extremely well done. Saw it in an audience of children and adults at the Mill Valley Film Festival, and everyone enjoyed it immensely. Very European in feeling, totally unlike anything that would be made in the U.S. Would love to see more of this Latvian claymation work; it appears to come out of a long history of puppetry. Found the English dialogue to be perfectly satisfactory. And the jerkiness of the claymation was part of the charm of the film. Great sense of humor in this version--the faces, the sheep, the dogs, etc. There is supposed to be a video on the Internet showing the making of this film, but have been unable to find it. (It was in that search that I came across this site.)

Stop motion puppetry is known to most people (in the US at least) from the TV Christmas specials about Rudolph the red nosed reindeer. This film doesn't add much to the field. Stop motion puppetry is poorly suited to action sequences of sword fighting, the dialogue is average and I found some of the voices annoying, and the plot has been stripped down to the bare essentials, which leaves adult viewers wondering about the motivation of all of the characters.

Lest you get them confused, stop motion puppetry does not mean the expressive claymation of Wallace and Grommit. The only facial motion these puppets are capable of is moving their mouths up and down.