Metacritic reviews

Many times more African than "Tarzan" and "The Lion King" combined, Kirikou and the Sorceress is one of the best movies so far in this very young year.

Taking its artistic inspiration from African sculpture and Egyptian art, the distinctive pictorial style of Ocelet's award-winning feature is bolstered by an authentic soundtrack from Senegalese musician Youssou N'dour. Couple this with the film's pint-sized but big-mouthed hero, and you've got one of the most enchanting animated features in quite some time.

Kirikou is a wonder because it’s such a familiar kind of story, told in such an unusual way.

A welcome antidote to anodyne Hollywood cartooning.

The sweet-natured Kirikou and the Sorceress, is a French animated movie drawing on a West African tale that has an authenticity The Lion King lacks.

Kirikou and the Sorceress is definitely a sunny spot in the mire of frenetic, violent and often dopey cartoon films produced by Hollywood. It's also far more imaginative that most.

Coupled with the fact that the plant and animal life (hoopoes, zorilles and ground squirrels, among other beasties) really look African, and that the film's original score is by the great contemporary Senegalese musician Youssou N'Dour, Kirikou and the Sorceress's surprising honesty about the banality of evil makes the movie -- even with all its magic -- feel truly authentic.

The plots of animated features are often excuses for visual showboating, but here the lilting story line, based on west African folktales, complements the alternately sumptuous and austere images.

Set in a vivid two-dimensional African village, the animated fable is jerky, odd but redolent somehow of Saturday morning and the night's sleep before.

It's more a piece to admire than to be involved by, yet it's easy to imagine children hypnotized by a hero tinier than they are when "Kirikou" is continually loaded into the VCR.