I should be upfront with my biases: this movie shows off Portland in a way a lotta Portlanders love; they’re flocking to the cinemas, the shows are sold out (I got turned away the first time, at The Bagdad, not having bought my ticket in advance online). So yeah, as a Portlander, I felt onboard with it, including the part about staying out of Forest Park and leaving it to the magical animals. Good policy.
This is a coming of age story of course, aimed at the same audience as Inside Out and Inside Out 2. Also the Narnia series, more than Alice in Wonderland, although it has elements of both. The sister-daughter, who is coming of age, has to grapple with a whole Other World, one with its own long term tensions. As the forest people keep telling her: what’s going on here is way bigger than you, so don’t take on some Atlas complex and think you’re driving the plot; you’re just a plot element.
She’s snapping out of her childhood fantasy world, waking up to the bigger world, the adult world, only to find the adults are as steeped in fantasy as the kids ever were, just with higher stakes, including her brother, who was always intended for a Forest Park client. The mom was a surrogate mom for her number two, in exchange for her number one. That’s a bit of a spoiler, sorry. My reviews tend to be aimed at those who’ve already seen the movie. More spoilers ahead.
I say more Narnia than Alice in Wonderland because Narnia, like Middle Earth, is a violent place, with lots of death and destruction, meaning it’s an Adult World (rated A for Adult). What it takes to survive here is a lotta courage and both the sister and her boy sidekick, less mature (girls mature faster than boys at that age), have courage, which they exercise (display) in different ways. The boy isn’t sure if he’s a pessimist or a pacifist (he’s still learning his native language) but he’s definitely stepping into his future self by becoming more of warrior (self awareness is part of it).
The ivy plays a major role as the rhizome (a philosophical term), the archetype of Entropy, claiming whole civilizations by tearing them down, reminding us of mortality on a big scale, as well as on a personal scale. We take it personally when civilizations go under. Fortunately Portland itself is under no real threat in the movie, nor for real at the time of this writing, Cascadia not having been party to WDC’s ill-advised misadventures.
The sister is separated from her brother, but in a way in which she’s semi-complicit, but only because her dad seems like a bit of a nutcase. If she lets his edicts rule her life she’ll grow up inhibited and damaged, she can sense that. She displays normal tween-to-teen defiance. But her dad has withheld critical information. Had she had more context, she would’ve tempered her defiance. She was unaware of the true dangers.
From the point of view of adults, kids seem too flush with their own sense of immortality, leading them to take foolish risks and risk means failure a lotta times (kind of by definition). When the prince in Forest Park, one of the magical characters, rushes off on a horse, unsupervised by his parents, he gets into trouble, and that makes his mom cuckoo. Our protagonist has to confront the phenomenon of cuckoo moms, another A-rated topic.
The claymation itself is lovingly rendered and all the characters are portrayed with enormous talent, endowed with textured and credible personalities, even if we’re immersed in the world of archetypes and fantasy beings. Teaching about the world through talking animals, fairytale style, is not “childish” if it’s about the real stuff. Keeping it real while diving deep into dream worlds is a high art, and this studio is up to the challenge in my view. Again, see first paragraph: I’m somewhat biased.
My late wife Dawn Wicca was a connoisseur of coming of age stories like this one. My sense is she’d’ve appreciated this film at least as much as I did. I wish we could have seen it together. As it was, I had three seats to myself for this noontime matinee.
I needed a quick break during the parental confession scene (just the first part) and The Bagdad pipes the audio to the restroom (an advantage of not being a multiplex) so I wasn’t missing out on plot developments. I was back in my seat for the St Johns bridge scene (one of several), wherein the 2nd child was promised to the client. The mom was hellbent on having a first (the sister, our protagonist). Also, she had no idea her client was a psycho and that her 2nd (the little brother) would be in physical danger in her care. Child abuse is another theme.
