User reviews

Reviewed by KIDS FIRST! Film Critic, Morgan Bertsch, age 7. Video review here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krL5oxIy9hE

This movie is a hand drawn cartoon from France. The voice overs were done twice, once in French and then in English. It is amazing that all the images were hand drawn. In order to really understand this movie and all it took to get this movie to the big screen you must watch the bonus features including the making of Mia and the Migoos. I am only seven which means it took them almost as long to make this movie as I have been alive. WOW! Six years of drawing, music, sound, voice overs and it is finally done. The art is amazing. The shadowing and colors are bright and happy and bring the characters to life. I could not imagine drawing ever frame of this movie by hand. Keeping this in mind while you watch it and you will see just how special this movie is. In a time of computers it is great to see people still using pencil, paper, ink and paint to create such a piece of art. The music is creepy and was created with a full orchestra and parts of the story are scary. So the music matches well. Perfect sound effects add to the believability and the attention to details they put into every picture is incredible. Mia has a dream that her Father is missing. When she wakes up she decides to go up to the mountains and see if she can find her lost father. He is trapped underground. Mia is fearless and has a spirit for adventure. She has a big heart but learns not to judge people by their looks alone. Along the way we meet many funny, strange and cute people and creatures. My favorite part was when Mia meets the Migoos.When she gets to the forest, she meets the scary Migoos who she discovers are not scary at all but funny and friendly. You can see through parts of them. They are able to get small and grow larger. There are many language differences so they have funny moments where they are trying to relate to Mia. It is the Migoos job to protect the tree of life. There are evil people out to destroy it. Does Mia find her father? Who finds out they have a heart after all? The ages are 6 and up I give it 4 twinkling stars. Be forewarned there is some bad language.

Dear Adults,

Please stop trying to review children's movies as if they were made for you. Let's ask a child. My son who is seven years old, says he gives it a TEN. Since I have more experience of movies, I have to reserve one star for perfection. But let me tell you how much he loved this movie. He usually hates to be forced to learn Chinese Mandarin, and we watched this in Chinese Mandarin except for a few moments when we tried to see what it was like in French. We had no English option, since I purchased the movie in Taiwan a long time ago. He was riveted and was completely engaged and did not complain once about it being in Chinese, even with all the different accents that they lovingly tried to give all the different characters, just like you would hear in French.

He says, "I loved how the movie was about what if the entire world was destroyed. I liked seeing the little girl and what it would be like to have to travel somewhere without cars or planes."

That's what it's about, folks. A beautiful movie, where the villains are the parents. They are humans. And all it takes to fix the problem is to realize that you can change and say you're sorry. A movie filled with hope and with a focus on the most precious things on the planet, our children.

I saw this film at the world premiere at the Festival d'Annecy 2008, in Annecy, France. The designs were charmingly old school and the movie seemed cute.

Unfortunately, it's really badly written. The story, although it's for kids and revolves around a very classical them (mean greedy corporate suit destroys nature for money but little innocent girl meets magical beings and fights with only her innocence), is treated way too naively.

Although the characters have clear goals, the story is really badly structured and the overall pace of the film is boring. The fact that the dialogue are extremely poor only makes it worse. They're awkward, sound awfully unnatural, are way too long and inefficient for conveying the needed information to the audience.

So bad story, badly structured, served by bad dialogues. But the actors suck quite a bit too. I saw the movie in its original french version (my mother tongue), and the actors just sound awful and lack believability and every single one of their lines (the fact that they've been given amateur lines in the first place must not help).

All of the above plus a million other details make a movie that just simply DOESN'T work. Every person I spoke to after the screening (many of them animation professionals) said they just couldn't get to care about the characters and that none of the emotion worked in the film. Nobody felt sad when something sad happened, nobody felt any kind of tension during the scenes where there was supposed to be some, the climax didn't work at all, etc.

I'm here judging the film on its "film" qualities (writting, directing, acting), not on the technical side of things. But as a side note: the animation sucked balls, too. A few characters are cute, but the Migou (the strange creature) just look awkward and have an annoying personality.

What was very promising seems just like the poor man's My Neighbour Totoro.

It still bends my mind that it takes so long (6 years) to mount and produce such a film. The animation industry seems like a crazy place that needs to refine its financing channels...