LASSIE: A NEW ADVENTURE

Stars: Nico Marischka, Katharina Schüttler, Dennis Mogen, Justus von Dohnányi, Annette Frier, Maike Jüttendonk, Anna Lucia Gualano, Pelle Staacken, Xiduo Zhao and Priscilla Wittman.
Writer: Andreas Cordes
Director: Hanno Olderdissen

Rating: ★ ★ ★

 

Since she first appeared in Eric Knight’s 1943 novel Lassie Come Home, the beloved Collie heroine has proven a resilient commercial property, even when the material doesn’t shine quite as much as her lustrous coat. Such is the case with her latest bigscreen incarnation, a kids-own adventure mystery that pits Lassie and her tween-age pals against some nasty dognappers in the Deutsche countryside.

Director Hanno Olderdissen returns to the franchise after having guided 2020’s Lassie Come Home to robust European box office and brings along that film’s young star, the likable Nico Marischkka, reprising as Lassie’s boy owner, Flo. Instead of summer in the Canary Islands with his parents, the young master and his pet are staying with Aunt Cosima (Katharina Schüttler), whose lovely cottage is also home to foster kids Kleo (Anna Lucia Gualano) and Henry (Pelle Staacken).

But, for some reason, the local leafy village is also a hub for a canine blackmarket run by dog-thief Delphine, played by a fully-committed Maike Jüttendonk in full Cruella de Vil mode. Lassie (played by strapping animal actor ‘Bandit’), along with her puppy pals Pippa, an energetic Jack Russell Terrier, and Spike, a feisty French Bulldog, infiltrate the crime ring and, with Flo and Kleo and Aunt Cosima providing two-legged support, set about bringing the baddies to justice.

Olderdissen and writer Andreas Cordes work all the tropes we’ve come to expect from our Lassie adventures, including but not limited to the iconic line, “Lassie, get help!” and two key sequences of the furry heroine running at full clip through the picturesque scenery. Also deftly handled by the storytellers is the ‘family is important’ subplot that, while low-hanging fruit thematically in a movie like this, is engaging to the end.

The producers know their audience, which skews even younger here than it did with the 2020 instalment. The baddies are buffoonish and the dogs are never subjected to the horrors that real-world traffickers would inflict upon their captives; in fact, in one giggly sequence, they even wash them, which provides some all-ages slapstick. 

Not ‘A New Adventure’ in any meaningful way, as the title suggests, but rather an option for family audiences that will evoke warm memories for parents and harmless thrills for under-10s.

MOOMINVALLEY: SEASON 3, EPISODES 4, 8, 12

Voice Cast: Taron Edgerton, Rosamund Pike, Warwick Davis, Bel Powley, Matt Berry, Jack Rowan, Chance Perdomo, Edvin Endre and Jennifer Saunders.
Writers: Josie Day, Mark Huckerby, Nick Ostler, Paula Dinan; based on characters created by Tove Jansson.
Director: Darren Robbie.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

 Screening at the 2023 Children’s International Film Festival from May 27 in Sydney and Melbourne.

Finnish author Tove Jansson’s sweet and heartfelt Moomins family adventures have entranced European audiences since they were first published in 1945 in the picture book, ‘The Moomins and the Great Flood’. The fairy-tale existence that Jansson envisioned for her creations - a rustic, rural life in a wooded valley, surrounded by fantasy forest denizens and towering, frosted Alpine peaks - has reached iconic status in the Scandi states, and is increasingly adored abroad.

Having conquered family markets internationally over their eight delightful decades (including a 1974 opera, a 1990 animated series that sold to 60 countries, and theme parks in Finland and Japan), the latest incarnation of the Moomins adventures is Moominvalley, the 2019 animated series now in its third season. Three English-dubbed episodes will have their Australian Premiere at the 2023 Children’s International Film Festival, satiating the small but burgeoning Australian fanbase.     

The first of the three 22-minute original narratives is ‘Inventing Snork’, in which cheeky pre-teen Moomintroll (revoiced by Taron Edgerton) tries to help the socially-awkward Snork better understand the value of friendship through compassion. The thematic throughline is accepting people for who they are, a familiar humanistic beat in Moomins’ storytelling. Rounding out the series is ‘Moominmamma's Flying Dream’, a sweet story in which Moominmamma's love of hot air ballooning is rekindled by her son, only for everyone to reach the conclusion that the joys of family is life’s greatest adventure. 

The best of the trio is the middle episode, ‘Lonely Mountain’. Moomintroll cancels his hibernation to find his best friend Snufkin, who has ventured deep into the mysterious Lonely Mountains for some meditative solitude. Moomintroll misses his friend and acts on that self-focussed longing, not realising that Snufkin’s time away helps make him the special friend he is. The range of complex emotions explored in the scenes between Moomintroll and Snufkin is terrific character-driven animation; the grandeur of the region and the harsh realities of both the wintry outdoors and growing up are beautifully realised.

In the three episodes programmed for the festival, we get a good indication as to why the Moomins have remained one of Finland's most beloved exports and Tove Jansson’s exalted status as a teller of meaningful fantasy tales is etched deeply in European culture. The Moomins speak to the profound truths in family life, steeped in the beautiful colours of their homeland and the vivid world of the imagination.

THE WILLOUGHBYS

Featuring the voices of: Will Forte, Maya Rudolph, Terry Crews, Martin Short, Jane Ktakowski, Seán Cullen, Alessia Cara and Ricky Gervais.
Writers: Chris Pearn and Mark Stanleigh; based on the book by Lois Lowry.
Director: Chris Pearn.

Available on:

Rating: ★ ★ ★

The plot to The Willoughbys sounds like a Netflix kind of pitch; four children, including two creepy twins, plan patricide and matricide to rid themselves of selfish, abusive parents and willingly render themselves orphans. But instead of the streaming platform’s umpteenth must-watch true-crime mini-series, director Chris Pearn delivers the network’s second animated family adventure, an adaptation of Lois Lowry’s darkly hued but sweet natured children’s book.

Having helmed the flavourful, frantic, if hollow sequel, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, Pearn offers a similarly colourful if slightly too contrived retelling of Lowry’s bestseller. The story’s protagonist is put-upon pre-teen Tim (Will Forte), the eldest of the four Willoughby children and the least likely to show any sign of inheriting the family’s distinctive feature, a deep red moustache. His sister Jane (Moana songstress Alessia Cara) is a dreamer, but one who curtails her longings to help care for the twins, both called Barnaby (Seán Cullen). The parents (Martin Short, Jane Krakowski) are despicable people, self-obsessed and petulant, who cast Tim to the basement coalpit each night and refuse to feed the children for days on end.

Inherently dark material (one winces at what a Tim Burton or Guillermo del Toro adaptation might have looked like), but Pearn’s animation style is richly textured and wildly imaginative, the visuals softening the jagged edges. Proceedings are lightened up further thanks to the droll narration of The Cat (Ricky Gervais); the introduction of the boisterous Nanny (a wonderful Maya Rudolph); and, shifting the location at crucial points to a candy factory run by the larger-than-life Commander Melanoff (Terry Crews).

Early on, Jane finds new purpose in her life and Pearn amps up the slapstick when a mischievous baby enters The Willoughby’s home (exhibiting agility not unlike Jack Jack Parr), but the character soon fades away. It is one of several spasms of undeveloped material that feel like the adaptation was unable to overcome leftover chapter-beats from its source material. One sequence, in which the four children ‘Home Alone’ prospective buyers, feels like an altogether different short film entirely. A third act that sends the kids to Sweezerlund spins the film into pure fantasy and appears to be setting up a predictably feel-good conclusion, but credit to the production for staying true to the narrative’s darker themes, up until the final frames.

The Willoughbys is too hit-miss to achieve the instant classic status bestowed upon Netflix’s debut cartoon feature, the Oscar-nominated Klaus (2019). But if the storytelling stumbles, Pearn and his animators certainly deliver colour and movement in a manner that is sure to enthrall the under 10s.

VHYES

Stars: Mason McNulty, Rahm Braslaw, Kerri Kenney, Charlyne Yi, Courtney Pauroso, Thomas Lennon, Mark Proksch, John Gemberling, Cameron Simmons, Tim Robbins, Natalie Mering, Nunzio Randazzo, Jake Head and Christian Drerup.
Writers: Nunzio Randazzo, Jack Henry Robbins.
Director: Jack Henry Robbins.

Available from July 9-19 via Perth Revelation Film Festival's online screening event, COUCHED.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

A skit-filled ‘Kentucky Fried Movie’-like takedown of kitsch 1980s media culture develops into a far more prescient and surprisingly moving satire in Jack Henry Robbin’s VHYes. Capturing that moment mid-decade when VCR/camcorder technology fused, allowing American society to change the course of how visual media was created, captured and consumed, this wacky but wise boys-own adventure as seen through the lens of late-night television and self-made home movies won’t connect with everyone (it is shot entirely on VHS and Betacam, for goodness sake!). But for those who lived that cultural shift, it’s a smart, subversive blast.

Framed as a best-friends/suburban-family adventure story (think ‘80s staples like E.T. or Explorers or The Goonies), feature debutant Robbins’ protagonist Ralphie (Mason McNulty) is introduced on Christmas morning 1987, being gifted the latest in home video technology - the camcorder. The character’s name and this setting will invoke to many U.S. viewers Bob Clark’s yuletide classic A Christmas Story, in which a young boy’s dreams were also enabled by a gift that allowed him to shoot randomly with little regard for the consequences.

Ralphie grabs the first apparently blank VHS cassette he can find and starts filming, unaware he is erasing his parents’ wedding day memories. This is a familiar comedic set-up, however it takes on a darker relevance as Robbin’s themes unfold. Soon, the unlimited potential the camcorder affords Ralphie - to both express himself and discover the bold new world that is midnight-to-dawn TV - is capturing hard truths about his household. The innocence of his young mind is being usurped, while the undercurrent of detachment his mom (Christian Drerup) and dad (Jake Head) are experiencing is being unwittingly chronicled. Appearing fleetingly between the insurgent new late-night content, we glimpse their happier times.

Ralphie’s adventures in after-dark television offer up some hilarious parodies of recognisable cable-net ‘80s programming, recalling segments from Peter Hyam’s Stay Tuned (1992), Ken Shapiro’s The Groove Tube (1974) and the anthology Amazon Women on The Moon (1987). Best amongst them include bickering telemarketers Tony V and Cindy, featuring Thomas Lennon’s ‘heirloom-pen’ salesman (“…it literally does everything that a pen can do.”); the basement-shot talk show, Interludes with Lou, hosted by Lou (Charlyne Li); and, the heavily-edited adult entertainment offerings from Cinemax-like porn peddlers, (tonight’s feature, Sexy Swedish Illegal Aliens From Space XXX). Robbins also expands upon comedy shorts he’s previously filmed, including fresh episodes of Painting (and Cooking, Plumbing and Sleeping) with Joan, featuring a side-splitting Kerri Kennedy, and the global warming-themed sex romp, Hot Winter.

The parody channels fly by, reflecting precisely the impact on a remote control of a teenage boy’s attention span, until Ralphie settles upon a true-crime special that profiles a girl’s murder at the hands of her own sorority sisters in his very neighbourhood. With best friend Josh (Rahm Braslaw) reluctantly by his side, Ralphie takes his camcorder into the burnt-out shell of a home that was the scene of the crime hoping to record a ghostly presence.

The sequence allows Robbins to come full circle in his skewering of western culture’s obsession with self-image; Ralphie becomes the star of his own handheld-horror film, the kind that came into existence as a by-product of the handy-cam boom (notably The Blair Witch Project, but there were so many). VHYes captures and contemplates the moment thirty-three years ago that has since morphed into the YouTube/selfie/profile-obsessed world that we are slaves to today.

In one final image, Jake Henry Robbins stops just shy of condemning ‘image culture’ entirely – in the credit-roll outtakes, he captures the film’s co-producers, his separated parents Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, having a happy moment on his set. The footage, which lasts mere seconds, impacts like a polaroid, providing a vivid recollection of memories captured in an instant. They are frames filled with warmth for both the viewer and, one assumes, the director and underline his point that not everything needs to be filmed and filtered and posted. Finding the essential truth in singular moments is the true skill to recording personal history.

A BOY CALLED SAILBOAT

Stars: Julian Atocani Sanchez, Noel Gugliemi, Elizabeth De Razzo, Jake Busey, Keanu Wilson, Rusalia Benavidez, Zeyah Pearson, Lew Temple, Patricia Kalis and J.K. Simmons.
Writer/Director: Cameron Nugent

Rating: ★★★★

Like his eponymous ukulele-wielding protagonist, writer-director Cameron Nugent strikes the perfect chord with his feature-length debut, A Boy Called Sailboat. An understated, utterly beguiling dose of doe-eyed magic-realism, the Australian’s fanciful but sure-footed foray into one Hispanic family’s life in the U.S. south-west could not be more timely; in telling one small story, A Boy Called Sailboat also celebrates the common humanity that binds diverse communities.

Few depictions of life’s base pleasures – food, music, family and love – play out with such sweet-natured resonance as in Nugent’s narrative. The premise, like the lives led by the humans at its core, is simple; a pre-teen boy (the wonderful Julian Atocani Sanchez), blessed with both a vivid imagination and strongly-defined sense of family, stumbles on a small, discarded guitar and decides to teach himself to play, so that one day he may sing a self-penned song to his ailing ‘abuela’ (Rusalia Benavidez).

However, the lives of all around him – father José (Noel Gugliemi), mother Meyo (Elizabeth De Razzo), best friend Peeti (Keanu Wilson), school crush Mandy (Zeyah Pearson), teacher Bing (Jake Busey), a local DJ (Lew Temple) and ultimately the entire population of his New Mexico suburb – are given greater profundity when they hear Sailboat play his uke and sing his song, a composition that renders anyone who hears it emotionally reborn. In a bold and effective device, every time the boy sings Nugent’s screen goes silent but for a single chord, thereby forcing his audience to bring their own definition of what most deeply stirs their soul.

A Boy Called Sailboat has many idiosyncratic beats and skewed nuances, the kind that need a strongly-defined real-world emotional connection to work. Ten minutes in, Nugent has filled his film with so many small, strange tics (a yacht being towed in the desert; a leaning home held upright by a single beam; a meatballs-only nightly meal; a soccer-obsessed kid who holsters an eye dropper) there is the very real threat that his vision will die the death of a thousand quirks.

Thankfully, Nugent proves himself to be a master of meaningful whimsy, in much the same way as Wes Anderson (a clear inspiration, especially his 2012 triumph, Moonrise Kingdom) or early Tim Burton (circa 1990s Edward Scissorhands). All his actors are attuned to his nuanced vision, especially a cameoing J.K. Simmons (pictured, above) as used-car salesman/life-coach Ernest; in one wonderful sequence, Nugent skillfully edits a series of reveals as the Oscar-winning actor monologues some life advice to young Sailboat, while the kid stares transfixed at…a sailboat.

Talent extends behind the camera, too, not only in the form of DOP John Garrett’s skill with sparse, hot location work. The production’s collaboration with classical guitarists Leonard and Slava Grigoryan has provided a soundtrack of wistful, lovely melodies, many traditional sea-faring tunes (‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’; ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’) in line with Sailboat’s oceanic obsession. All contributors reinforce the filmmaker’s remarkably assured stewardship, resulting in surely the most impressive calling-card film in recent memory.

LOTS OF KIDS, A MONKEY AND A CASTLE

Featuring: Julita Salmerón, Gustavo Salmerón, Antonio García Cabanes, Ramón García Salmerón, Paloma García Salmerón, David García Salmerón, Ignacio García Salmerón and Julia García Salmerón.  
Screenplay: Gustavo Salmerón, Raúl de Torres, Beatriz Montañez.
Director: Gustavo Salmerón.

Screening at LALIFF, Los Angeles on June 23 and June 24.

Rating: 4/5

A Spanish matriarch’s recipe for happiness is examined through her son’s melancholy, bittersweet lens in Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle, a charming study of family dynamics, shifting generational values and the challenge of just plain growing old from actor/director Gustavo Salmerón.

On her wedding day, Julita Salmerón wished for three things from her new life – a vast family, a pet monkey and a traditional dwelling that recalls the majesty of her homeland’s history. In Julita’s eyes, these are symbols of affluence but by the mid 00’s (the film utilises decades of footage, from family photos dating back a century to iPhone coverage), they have come to represent very different things.

Gustavo (a well-known actor in his homeland), his five siblings and their own families have gathered to empty their parent’s castle of its riches before the bank takes possession, the clan having lost much of its wealth in the economic crisis; the monkey is long gone, having turned from family pet into an objectionable pest who literally bit the hand that fed it once too often. As the family struggles with cumbersome relics such as chandeliers and knight’s armour, Julita recalls the moments, memories and dreams, both lived and unfulfilled, that have shaped her life.

As this lovely film unfolds, Julita transforms from the eccentric, feisty Spanish ‘abuela’ who hoards a lifetime of trinkets (from plastic pipes and knitting needles to her grandparents’ vertebra) into a deeply humanistic presence increasingly consumed with her own mortality and legacy. Both very funny (she convinces her family to indulge in a rehearsal for her own wake) and very sweet (she adores her husband, despite a long period without physical intimacy and his contrary views on Spain’s political past), she speaks directly to her son’s camera with the frankness of a septuagenarian with no reason to keep opinions or secrets to herself any longer.

Her circumstances are specific to her situation, but Julita’s sentimentality and desire for a life that has long passed her by has a universality that is instantly relatable. The intimacy of the footage, the forthright insight she conveys and the openness with which she embraces her newfound role as ‘documentary subject’ is wonderfully endearing. By the final frames of Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle, one entirely understands why she is adored, held in awe and quietly tolerated in equal measure.

SGT. STUBBY: AN AMERICAN HERO

Featuring the voices of: Logan Lerman, Helena Bonham Carter, Gerard Depardieu, Nick Rulon, Jordan Beck, Brian Cook, Jim Pharr and Jason Ezzell.
Writers: Richard Lanni and Mike Stokey.
Director: Richard Lanni

Rating: 3.5/5

He was one of the finest American heroes of The War to End all Wars; a unwaveringly stoic soldier who served beside his countrymen, the troops of the 102^nd Infantry Regiment, in the trenches of France against a determined German army. He saw 17 close-quarters combat situations, usually by the side of his best friend, Private Robert Conroy. Upon his return to the U.S., he was lauded as a national hero, met with The Commander in Chief and was rewarded for his bravery by being bestowed the rank of Sargeant, the first four-legged officer in American military history.

Yes, four-legged. This soldier was a Boston terrier, with a short stubby tail, an appendage that earned him the name ‘Stubby’. To coincide with the 100^th anniversary of his nation’s entry into the European theatre of WWI, the spirited all-American mutt has been reborn as a bigscreen hero in director Richard Lanni’s computer-animated version of his dog’s life.

It is fair to say that Lanni’s film is one of the more unusual cartoon features in recent years. A co-production between Ireland, The U.K., France, Canada and The U.S.A., it lovingly renders the period, capturing with an artist’s eye Stubby’s early life in the picturesque Connecticut countryside, his voyage to Europe and, with a particularly evocative sense of location, the trenches of the Western Front. A more stark design palette, recalling classic war film imagery, is employed to convey troop movements and geographical data; in one instance, the menacing shadow of a German ‘bird of war’ descends upon the European front. (Ed: This is a kids film, right?)  

The director is an accomplished war documentarian and for his first animated feature he has drawn as much upon the realism of his factual films as he does the Disney/Pixar model. Parents won’t be expecting to field questions like, “What’s mustard gas, mommy?”, but Lanni’s storytelling doesn’t skimp on the realities of Stubby’s frontline tour. Like all good, similarly straightforward war yarns, there are rifles firing, grenades hitting their marks and shadowy figures lurking in smoky killing fields.

Yet in scene after scene is this buoyant, lovable lead character straight out of a Dreamworks-style romp. Stubby’s considerable screen presence and emotional centre comes entirely from his physicality; Lanni foregoes any vocal anthropomorphising, instead providing for his star the best animation his computer artists can offer to create dimensionality. Stubby is every bit the great animated hero, utterly lovable in the eyes of the tykes while also legitimately heroic for the war movie fans. And like many American G.I.’s on duty in Europe, he enjoys some R&R in Paris, a sequence that is as lovely as it sounds.

The human characters are not afforded the same level of artistry; Conroy is blandly drawn, Logan Lerman’s voicing thankfully providing character nuance. Gerard Depardieu does good work as burly French fighter Gaston Baptiste, staying on the right side of stereotype; in voice over, Helena Bonham Carter plays Conroy’s sister, whose recounting of her brother’s friendship with Stubby the basis for the film.

Sgt Stubby’s life was well documented (upon his passing, the New York Times ran a half-page obituary), so there is very little leeway for embellishment in telling his story. Which makes Richard Lanni’s family-themed wartime shaggy dog adventure all the more remarkable, both as a rousing account of one of the most unlikely heroes in combat history and, frankly, as a film that exists at all.

FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS

Stars: Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried, Kylie Rogers, Aaron Paul, Diane Kruger, Bruce Greenwood, Jane Fonda, Quvenzhane Wallis, Octavia Spencer and Janet McTeer.
Writer: Brad Desch.
Director: Gabriele Muccino

Screening at the 2016 Young at Heart Film Festival.

Rating: 3/5

Despite a title that implies a broad ‘everyman’ perspective, Fathers and Daughters offers little resembling the ‘real world’. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author prone to public seizures to the social worker sex addict reconnecting to the world through the mute orphan, Gabrielle Muccino’s overripe melodrama positively overflows with a giddy commitment to its own ‘only in the movies’ excess. Audiences who well-up at the first sound of a single violin note will find enough to moisten a hankie or two in this lushly packaged, star-heavy soap opera; cynics, stop reading now.

Thematically tackling in sweeping brushstrokes the connect between childhood trauma and adult dysfunction, Muccino ultimately relies very heavily on editor Alex Rodriguez (Y Tu Mamá También, 2001; Children of Men, 2006), whose skill is tested to the limit in his handling of first time scribe Brad Desch’s back-and-forth narrative timeline. In 1989, a car crash leaves upwardly mobile writer Jake Davis (Russell Crowe) a widow and his cutie-pie daughter Katie (Kylie Rogers) without a mom; when mental health issues dictate Jake needs time in a sanitarium, Katie is put in the care of Aunt Elizabeth (Diane Kruger, gnawing on the set mercilessly) and Uncle William (Bruce Greenwood). When Jake’s latest book bombs despite the best efforts of lit-agent friend Teddy (Jane Fonda), Bill and Liz make their move on the tyke, seeking full time custody.

As all this high drama unfolds in the distant past, we become entangled in the present-day life of adult Katie (Amanda Seyfried), now a caseworker at an inner-city clinic. One minute, a hollow commitment-phobe who partakes in binge-boozing and public bathroom sex to feel any kind of connection, the next an empathetic human connection for recently orphaned Lucy (Quvenzhane Wallis), Seyfried’s doe-eyed performance runs the gamut from passion-free blankness to public histrionics. By her side in her exploration of daddy issues is writer Cameron (Aaron Paul), who brings his own obsession with Jake’s writing.

Gabrielle Muccino’s embrace of shamelessly saccharine sentimentality has found favour with international audiences previously. After scoring big beyond his homeland with the arthouse hit Remember Me, My Love (2003), Hollywood beckoned; he obliged, delivering the Will Smith double The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) and Seven Pounds (2008). Returning to grand family drama after the dire rom-com Playing For Keeps (2012), the Italian stages Jake and Katie’s journey with an unyielding commitment to gorgeousness; in line with the florid dramatics on show are DOP Shane Hurlbut’s rich visuals, production designer Daniel Clancy’s lavish sets and composer Paolo Buonvino orchestral score. When the time-hopping plot starts to strain, there is always something cinematically compelling in Fathers and Daughters.

However, Muccino’s greatest assets prove to be more personal, in the form of leading man Russell Crowe and co-star, Kylie Rogers (a seasoned pro despite her tender years after roles in Space Station 76 and the current release, Miracles From Heaven). The pair’s genuine warmth and chemistry is energising, even when the film is running off the rails in every other regard. In addition to conveying the horrible physical stresses of a grand-mal seizure on several occasions, Crowe gives a performance that invests Jake with a grounded dignity; the effortless nature of his scenes with a quivery-lipped Rogers recall the father/child dynamic between Dustin Hoffman and Justin Henry in Kramer vs Kramer (yet, in all fairness, comparisons with that or any Best Picture winner must end there).

PAPER PLANES

Stars: Ed Oxenbould, Sam Worthington, Deborah Mailman, Nicholas Bakopoulos-Cooke, Ena Imai, Terry Norris, Peter Rowsthorn, Julian Dennison and David Wenham.
Writer: Steve Worland and Robert Connolly.
Director: Robert Connolly.

Rating: 2/5

Although it is tempting to be swayed by the ‘…but the kids’ll love it’ point of view, highly respected director Robert Connolly’s change-of-pace family pic Paper Planes is folksy, heavy-handed whimsy that barely finds its wings before crashlanding.

Writing with Steve Worland, whose last feature screenplay was the stomping dance pic Bootmen in 2000, Connolly foregoes the smarts of his more mature work (The Bank, 2001; Three Dollars, 2005; Balibo, 2009) to win over his target demographic with trite dialogue and plotting that grinds through the feel-good tropes. There is exuberance in the staging but not an ounce of real-world emotion in the narrative, which manufactures cute contrivances in place of genuine heart and accomplished storytelling (such as that found in the Oscar-winning animated short Paperman, also featuring the folded flying phenomenon).

The key protagonist is poor country kid, Dylan (Ed Oxenbould), a self-sufficient tween-ager who lives with his emotionally distant father Jack (Sam Worthington) on the dusty outskirts of Walerup in the Western Australian hinterland. The setting represents a return to the troubled dad/spirited son outback milieu that Connolly handled with far greater skill as producer on the Eric Bana 2007 vehicle, Romulus My Father (Bana returns the favour with an executive producer’s credit here).

The pair are doing it tough, with Jack struggling to deal with the grief of having lost his wife, Cindy (supermodel Nicole Trunfio, in flashback) only five months before. That said, Dylan seems to have bounced back pretty well from the loss; Oxenbould’s one-note performance conveys none of the shattering sense of loss a boy his age must be experiencing. The actor’s greatest struggle is more often with breathing any life into his strained, cumbersome lines.

Bouncing between Dylan’s home life and time spent in the company of cool maths teacher Mr Hickenlooper (a fun Peter Rowsthorne), these early scenes rarely ring true, mired in a struggle to establish a believable tonality. Dylan suffers at the hands of funny fat-kid bully Kevin (Julian Dennison), whose actions seem particularly callous given the recent tragic past; Grandpa (Terry Norris) is a randy old codger (wink-wink scenes with Dylan as he skips between bedrooms at the local nursing home are off-putting), who encourages his grandkid’s imagination but seems ignorant of the financial strife his grief-stricken family is in.

A chance school visit by a paper plane whiz kid leads Dylan to discover that he may have otherworldly skill in the art of A4 aeronautics, when his first attempt soars through doorways, down corridors and, ultimately, beyond the horizon. This early scene establishes that the ‘paper planes’ of the title won’t be paper at all but CGI renditions, capable of extraordinarily dexterous mid-air manoeuvrability. It’s a ‘go with it or be left behind’ challenge by Connolly, whose film soars or sinks on how willing its audience is to suspend disbelief in several key moments while also demanding a very real emotional involvement it never earns.

Dylan’s new skill takes him to Sydney, where he meets ambitious competitor Jason (Nicholas Bakopoulos-Cooke, playing villainy so broadly he might twist his moustache if he were old enough to have one), lovely Japanese entrant Kimi (Ena Imai) and ex-champ-turned-administrator, Maureen (Deborah Mailman, laying on the ‘comedic support’ schtick). Also on hand is David Wenham as Jason’s dad Patrick, a wizened ex-pro golfer who flits in and out of a handful of scenes as if he was above the whole endeavour.

The plot beats a very familiar path from here on in, with competition heats determining who goes to Tokyo for the Paper Plane World Championships conjuring some undeserved moments of faux excitement. The only left-field surprise in the third act is one character’s skill at securing cash for a plane ticket and getting from rural WA to the Japanese capital in less than a day.

Full disclosure: your reviewer’s 9 year-old daughter had a remarkably better time watching Paper Planes than her dad did. Granted, given all the shortcomings with which reviewers are likely to take issue, there is something to be said for the film’s efforts at a certain joie de vivre, especially at a time when children’s films exist mostly to spruik a toy tie-in.