Le chien, le général et les oiseaux

Let's face it: French animation has proved better than that. With great stuff like Le Roi et l'Oiseau, or Les Maitres du Temps, and, more recently, Kirikou and Les Triplettes de Belleville, it has shown much creativity and was able to find its own style, clearly different from American and Japanimation. Clearly, Le Chien... is well below that and probably doesn't even have any ambition to match such masterpieces (or so I hope).

For the good points: the story shows much originality, locating the scene in Old Mother Russia, the hero being an old forgotten general who defeated Napoleon. Good start, but that's all you'll get, as the rest is soooo predictable. Other originality: for the animation technique, they used computers to animate hand-made drawings. Well, some may call it a "style", but the result is very, very poor, making you think they didn't have much time or practice to do it... which is confirmed by the overuse of zooming and traveling. Just like a poor TV program. And it is sooooo slow! Dialogues are pathetic, far from the poetry the original story and drawings deserved. Those could have been far better, and they're not even cute.

Well, let's praise here an effort to make an original movie for children under 7 or 8. Probably this is only for kids, too bad I couldn't find a real point to this tale, beyond a very naive and unskilled attempt to teach the value of freedom to our children. From an adult point of view, the whole life of the old man is just very sad and depressing. This production is like one big step behind -or, at least, aside- in the history of European animation, especially disappointing because director Francis Nielsen is close to a genius (Il etait une fois l'homme, etc).