Movie Thoughts: Ernest & Celestine (2012)

 

• Released: May 23, 2012
  
• Directed by: Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner
• Running time: 1 h 20 min
• Rating 4/5

Synopsis

A bear who likes to eat and a mouse who dreams of becoming an artist become wanted criminals and have to now find a way to stay hidden from both the mouse and bear police.

My Thoughts

Not joking when I say I've wanted to see this one since it came out but I just never did. I don't know if it even got a release in the Netherlands because I never saw it advertised anywhere here. Luckily, it was on the Austrian version of Netflix so I could give it a watch anyways. I watched the original French version with subtitles, by the way, so no dub (if there's even any). 

And the movie is honestly...cute. Cute, wholesome and cozy is probably the best way to describe the movie. It feels like a heartwarming storybook story to read to children before going to bed. Heck, it even looks like one. The movie has this amazing watercolor-illustration looking style of 2D animation and backgrounds. It's perfectly fitting for the tone of the movie.

The plot is admittedly a bit simplistic, but it works most of the time. Bear and mouse societies live apart (bears above-ground, mice below) and mice generally fear bears, but Celestine was never afraid of them and believes they can be friends. One day during a raid on the above she meets Ernest the bear, and the two end up helping one another, though in the end it gets them both declared criminals and they have to retreat to Ernest's tiny house in the woods and go in hiding. Here, they start to bond with one another. Eventually they're both discovered and arrested (Ernest by the mouse cops, Celestine by the bear cops) and put on trial, but due to circumstances they're both acquitted and allowed to stay together as a father-daughter family.

So yeah, simplistic plot, and it works. But I do have to admit that around the trial part of the story things started to feel a little bit forced and rushed. Before that the movie mostly worked, though I did think that Ernest and Celestine started to bond just a little too quickly, but most of the film worked. They helped one another, they brought out the best in one another, it worked except it was a bit fast. But around the trial scene things just felt rather forced and quick. It was supposed to be this epic parallel between the two court trials, but just didn't work for me. 

A fire breaking out and Ernest and Celestine saving each of the judges respectively is what gets them acquitted, but it all just felt a little too convenient for things to work out like this. It's not outright bad, just really convenient for the plot and I think that with one or two extra rewrites this truly could've felt like a powerful scene where Ernest's and Celestine's kindness ends up saving the judges. But right now each courtroom scene is a perfect parallel of one another down to the extreme, so it just felt a bit too perfect and the conclusion was rather rush4ed. I don't mind the climax being small-scale, that actually works really well for the smaller scale of the overall story. It just felt a little bit "too" perfect and quick with the way things happened, if that makes sense. 

Also, the subplot with the bear son not being allowed to eat sweets is set up but never really delivered on. He is the son of a tooth-replacement seller (his mom) and a candy seller (his father), and it looks like the movie is setting up a subplot where he's never allowed to have any sweets by his parents but in the end he will get them, or something like that. But then that subplot is just...dropped about halfway into the movie. I don't think we even see the son again after we're 3/4 into the movie. So like, what was the point of establishing a conflict here if you weren't going to deliver on it at all? There's no resolution here.

So overall this is a beautiful-looking movie with a heartfelt story. The writing isn't always the very best and can feel a bit forced/rushed/too perfect (in the case of how the climax was handled), but overall this is a very cozy and cute small-scale movie. Definitely recommend you give this one a watch for the visuals alone.