Movie Thoughts: The Great Adventure (1953)

• Released: September 29th, 1953
• Directed by: Arne Sucksdorff
• Running time: 1h 17min
• Rating 3.5/5

  Synopsis

Near a farm in Sweden, a family of foxes lives in fear of the mean lynx who has his territory nearby. Meanwhile, two boys are taking care of a young otter they caught.

My Thoughts

I'm so mixed on this movie, man. The first third or so, where it is just a nice atmospheric movie about this fox family, this third I loved. But then halfway into the movie it starts to focus more on the human characters in favor of the animals and this had me a bit like "eh". Granted, I didn't hate the human characters or anything, but when what we had before was so good, it feels like a huge step backwards to suddenly start focusing on these generic kid characters.

It also doesn't help that the act on the kids isn't exactly stellar. I don't speak the language this movie is in, but you could still tell that these kids were acting and their performances didn't feel that genuine. I also didn't really like how they took an animal form the wild and shoved it into a tiny box, that feels cruel. I know their intentions were good, but that doesn't change the fact that their actions aren't that great.

That said, this movie does have a lot of good to offer. The first third, like I already said, was marvelous. A mostly silent section of the film except for some neat music. This part of the movie was really atmospheric and just felt very genuine (even if it is probably staged). It felt almost like a documentary. The music was nice, too, and I just wanted this family of foxes to survive so badly.

The cinematography was also quite neat, with lots of great nature shots. The fact that this movie is in black and white didn't bother me at all, for it was still beautifully shot.

I guess I would rate the fox-section of this movie about 4.5 stars, and then the section about the boys and the otter around 3 stars. So that averages out on about 3.5. I did like this movie a lot, but I wish it was just about the foxes and otters in nature without the human characters taking center stage. Then it could've been a truly great film.