Metacritic reviews

Here, within a thrilling tale that respects the intelligence of its audience, attentive parents will find the antidote to their fear that watching cartoons might rot your brain. If anything, April and the Extraordinary World seems bound to do the opposite, encouraging children to pursue their own passions and creativity.

Influences aside, the movie so teems with delightful detail and has such an exuberant sense of play that it feels entirely fresh.

This movie offers the kind of effortless Euro-adventure, full and fleet, that Steven Spielberg tried and mostly failed to deliver with his big-screen The Adventures Of Tintin.

This is one grand adventure, and, animated or not, those are always welcome.

It feels somewhat clichéd to call an animated adventure film a “delight,” but it’s the best word for the latest from GKids, April and the Extraordinary World, a joyful, accomplished movie that echoes “The City of Lost Children,” “The Adventures of Tintin,” “Metropolis,” “Howl’s Moving Castle” and something unique into a, well, delightful piece of work.

Nothing occurs that isn’t meticulously exacting to the story’s trajectory whether it’s seemingly throwaway characters or expert deflections of truth where the pieces are supplied but the underlying machinations are still out of reach.

There is plenty to marvel at in Tardi’s darker, alternate universe Paris, one that’s best watched with open minds and mouths agape at the incredible visual and storytelling imagination on display.

An all-too-rare example of steampunk done right — which also acknowledges that, however pretty such industrial imagery might seem from afar, actually living in such a world would be kind of horrible.

The film provocatively has audiences see the world's current ecological concerns in a different and unexpected light.

It’s only when the story heads to pure sci-fi territory later on that April stretches itself a bit thin, though a smart epilogue manages to put things in perspective for both the characters and viewer.