A great looking but soulless void of a film.

Rating: 6/10 (3 December 2019)

The first ten minutes of this are spellbinding. The animation is visionary and the accompanying music can't help but raise the hairs on the back of your neck. Then... well it drops off a cliff. The characterisations are empty; as two-dimensional as the cartoons themselves and no amount of sound effects and shouty-singing can bring them to life. I'm not asking for Paul Haggis or Aaron Sorkin - but surely a production of this magnitude, with this kind of budget, could find a writing team that didn't have to reduce this to "Janet and John in the Jungle"? Even if it is a kids film (I think not!) it deserves so much more substance to support the beautiful imagery than it gets. For reasons that aren't immediately clear to me; the lyric has been "updated" too - why? Truly a let down.