- Released: June 11th, 2019
- Directed by: Jean-François Laguionie, Xavier Picard
- Running time: 1h 17min
- Rating 3/5
Synopsis
My Thoughts
This is a movie that for real looked interesting to me. I've never heard of it or seen it being talked about, so it seems to be on the more obscure side (possibly indie?). Either way, I thought it would be a neat thing to check out. And it was...okay. Yeah, I expected to like this movie a bit more than I ended up doing. It definitely looked promising, but the final product is just a bit...eh?
Okay, I will get this out of the way first: This is a solid movie, even if I didn't really end up liking it much. It's visually pretty nice-looking (especially the 2D backgrounds are nice), it has a nice color palette, the two main characters are likable and their bond feels genuine, and the few side characters we get to know aren't half bad, either. The soundtrack is also nice and the ending really bittersweet. So there is a solid set-up here.
But the execution is just a bit mixed to me. I think a major thing that kills my enjoyment for this movie is just a combination of the slow pacing and the lack of things happening. I don't need every movie to be constant fast-paced action and a ton of visual stimuli, but it's nice if a movie has something going on, like something of a plot or a goal for the characters to work towards.
Here, it's mostly just one hour and seventeen minutes of our main characters just hanging out and doing stuff, with a few scenes of other things happening. And like, there are movies where I can absolutely just watch two solid characters spend time together. Robot Dreams comes to mind. But with Tom and Laurent, the boy and the prince, I just got a bit tired of them doing very little after a while. They are on the surface likable characters and I do enjoy seeing them bond, but after 45 minutes I was ready for actual stuff and a legit to begin happening, and very little ended up going down in the end.
The summary of this movie is really mainly just "Tom bonds with Laurent and they explore the museum and their surroundings together". And again, I do like these characters, but I just don't think they're strong and well-written enough to carry and entire, pretty much plot-less movie like this. I needed something else going on.
There is a smaller subplot of Laurent being presented to a council of scientists, which leads to some conflict, but again it's not really a main plot or anything and it's very brief. I do get that it's here to present the moral to the audience (xenophobia and racism is bad), but one semi-attached scene of action is not enough to get me invested in the painfully slow-paced and plot-less rest of the film.
Even the animation, while overall solid, just feels painfully slow in the action scenes. Like there'll be characters jumping or falling and it just feels like it's in semi slow-motion because of how slow-paced the movements are. The animation looks totally fine in the more mellow scenes. There, the pace of the visuals suits the movie. But in the more action-oriented scenes, you're gonna need fast and snappy animation, and that just felt a bit lacking here.
I also kind of have to question Tom's adoptive parent's decision to just let him go and explore the world with Laurent after a while. Like sure, Tom and Laurent have a nice friendship where together they like exploring new things and learning from each other, but we also gotta acknowledge the fact that after a while Tom's parents are just letting him go off into the world with a guy they by all means don't know very well. Like, sure, Tom knows Laurent well and trusts him, but neither of the two parents were shown to particularly care much about the prince (outside of what he could mean for their career). And then suddenly they're just okay with letting their underage son drop out of school to travel the world who, to their knowledge, is still relatively pretty much a stranger? I don't know, it feels a bit weird to me, and not like a smart parenting decision.
I think that if the movie had really established more of a parent-child relationship between Laurent and Tom maybe this could've worked better, but the time in which they got to know each other feels a bit too short for that, and their bond as is is more of a mentor-apprentice bond than a father-son. So yeah, I'm not too big a fan of the decision of Tom's parents to just let their son go with someone they don't know well.
This movie definitely has some nice things going for it, but the almost complete lack of a plot and slow pace just kinda killed it for me. I'm sure there's people who can still like this movie, so I do ultimately recommend you give it a chance if it interests you, but for me the two main leads weren't well-written enough to carry the entire movie.
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