* 3.9/5 Bones *
Release date: February 19, 2016 (Canada)
Directors: Franck Ekinci, Christian Desmares
Story by: Jacques Tardi
Production companies: Canal+, Eurimages
Directors: Franck Ekinci, Christian Desmares
Story by: Jacques Tardi
Production companies: Canal+, Eurimages
Language: French, English Subtitles
What was the first comic you ever read? If it was Marvel or DC Superhero comics, there’s a good chance that their ascension to the silver screen was something that excited you. Me, eh, as a kid, couldn’t care less about the body-painted streakers. I read my father’s comics - the French classics of The Adventures of Tintin and The Adventures of Asterix were the favourite of my brother and I. When I saw the trailers and concept art for April and the Extraordinary World, it looked more Tintin than the Tintin film. Its drawing style, magic-like technology and mystery investigation seemed a love letter to Hergé. Throw a couple of boobs and a black bob on that Tintin doll I know some of you have (koff koff Alex), add a dollop of steampunk, and let’s see if April can stand up to the nostalgia of childhood and the brutishness of a freshly graduated animation student.
April and the Extraordinary World takes place in an alternate world’s Paris (one with twin Eiffel towers!). Here, the industrial revolution started early and never really ended. Wars began over energy sources, and wars require energy. Scientists are conscripted to help the war effort, and one - Gustave Franklin - has the bright idea of making an invincible soldier serum.1Unfortunately, his attempts ‘only’ manage to create hyperintelligent and articulate animals. Emperor Napoleon III visits and decides this project is getting a serious budget cut. A cut to be applied with guns. However, guns and chemistry sets don’t mix. One explosion and Emperor Napoleon IV later, the remaining Franklins go on the run. Shortly after, scientists start to go missing from around the globe.
Fast-forward a few decades and Franklin’s descendants have just about perfected the serum - only for the French police to show up to forcefully conscript the Franklin scientists into the military.2 Just as the police close in, however, the weather turns nasty - and a cloud abducts the Franklin husband and wife, leaving their daughter April behind with nothing but a talking cat and a snowglobe.
On the run from a war-mongering government and a meteorological phenomenon, April grows up stealing books and continuing the scientific work that connects her to her lost family. Meanwhile: the world is sickened by coal dust and the only tree is kept in a museum, her grandfather searches for her and builds a house that would make the Wizard Howl raise an eyebrow, and the demoted police officer who chased her family sends a petty thief to trail her. All this to some well-observed character animation in gorgeous two-dimensional animation.
What a start, eh? Let’s talk about the characters.
“April” might be named after the month that celebrates them, but she’s no fool. She’s a surly, fashion-challenged teenager who doesn’t see the point in walking anywhere when she can stomp, doesn’t see the point in smiling when she can scowl, and doesn’t see the point in friends when she has a perfectly good cat who can quote ‘Othello’ already, thank you very much. Besides, she’s too busy to have a life when she’s this close to making the elixir of youth.
April is one of the best parts of the film. Female protagonists shouldn’t be hard to get right, but too often they’re portrayed as overly perfect or lacking any real traits, with willowy, identical bodies. With April, clear attempts have been made to subvert that, from her square frame and large nose to her detailed persona. She's capable of acts of bravery, great intelligence, and daring, but she is just as often guilty of temper, close-heartedness and being unforgiving. These traits are innate, and while she does learn to overcome them to a degree, some of them prove to be the source of her cunning and strength. But she isn’t a stone either - a scene at the beginning of the film reveals that her early loss made her stingy with her love, but those she does love are the extraordinary world to her. When her only friend lays dying, and she can do nothing, her walls crack. She breaks things because she cannot fix things. That’s something everyone can relate to.
April doesn't show it often, but her love is strong for the select few she dares to cherish.
The friend is Darwin, April’s infinitely prolonged cat. With a mouth that can run from 0-60 mph in a matter of seconds, he prances from scene to scene quoting literature, exchanging insults like sword parries, and matchmaking like a retired mother who just wants some grandkittens. Darwin is important not only as a comic relief, but as the heart of the story, both in terms of his likability and the fantasy of his being. Darwin is a failed by-product of an attempt to create The Elixir of Life. But he is entirely successful in capturing that wonder of Science as Magic, and our desires as children and adults to use our knowledge to do wonders so many past generations would consider impossible.
Other characters join and leave April on her quest. Her parents find themselves at odds in their captivity, the petty thief finds meaning in her quest, and her grandfather's mechanical prowess puts the 'Machine' in 'Deus Ex Machina', all while the plumper Thompson triplet police officer finds himself hopelessly out of his depth, often literally. Yet April is still kept front and center, along with Darwin.
Other characters join and leave April on her quest. Her parents find themselves at odds in their captivity, the petty thief finds meaning in her quest, and her grandfather's mechanical prowess puts the 'Machine' in 'Deus Ex Machina', all while the plumper Thompson triplet police officer finds himself hopelessly out of his depth, often literally. Yet April is still kept front and center, along with Darwin.
At its best, AatEW is a swashbuckling steampunk adventure, with characters both pursuing and combatting the wonders and horrors of science - how good smart people can create things with good intentions for humanity, not realizing that bad stupid people with bad intentions can be the ones to end up using it for themselves.3 Science is all about possibilities, and when the story has the most possibilities and unpredictability it’s one of the best-animated films of all time. When it comes to its ending and ties up those threads in the dullest way possible, it disappoints more than all the other films that use the same tired tropes.
As with so many other films, the weak points are the villains.
Mild spoilers ahead in a bit. But first, me grousing about the importance of villains again.
A tool of the bad guys. Ironic, and hypocritical, as it turns out, but never really explored.
Villains, if a film chooses to have them, are very difficult characters to get right. They are the inciting incident and personality; if they are not interesting, the story is not interesting, the film is not interesting. Because of this, I love and adore films that are brave enough to leave villains behind and find adversity in situations for their characters to overcome. Ghibli, in particular, has proved deft at this with films like Spirited Away, Whisper of the Heart and My Neighbour Totoro. Recently Pixar’s Inside Out was a revelation, where the ‘bad guy’ could be argued to be Joy herself for not allowing Riley to grow and feel the way she needed to.
That said, a great villain can do wonders. They can personify a hero’s fears and dreams, they can be charismatic scene-stealers, they can be despicable mutations of humanity to horrify the audience with our own dark potential.
Of late, the ‘Twist Villains Reveal’ has been popular in animated films. Disney caught it in Wreck-it-Ralph and it’s been a chronic condition ever since. This can be effective, but it also limits your time to develop your bad guy. More on that in my review of Zootopia, but first, let’s talk about the failed potential of these villains, who are revealed in the final act of the film and are the flattest characters in it. Not only that but....
This just has to be Thomson and Thompson's third man, Tompson. I know it.
Spoilers Start Now
... they’re talking lizards in bipedal mech-suits. Yep. Finish up laughing, and let me tell you that this is a phenomenal idea, if a disappointing reveal and design. These are actually the test subjects from April’s ancestor’s original attempts to make the serum.
The best villains are often funhouse reflections of the heroes. So here we have April’s extended family, driven to the same goals and legacy, and willing to do anything to make it happen. April stole books to make the formula to find her family and save her cat’s life, while the lizards stole people to make the formula to preserve their family and create life in space. They’re also a reflection of Darwin the cat, finding themselves possessed of immense intelligence that separates them from their animal relatives, and yet does not allow them standing in human society. It’s pretty brilliant, and one of the lizards, Chimene, is a fascinating personality. She’s warm and motherly, but obsessed with knowledge, convinced she can make enormous changes to the universe for the better, elevating herself from human-like lizard to lizard-like goddess. She’s brought down, however, by her companion, Rodrigue, whose motivations are the more pedestrian ‘rule the world’4 kind. He ultimately gets her out of the way, and everything else is pretty predictable.
It’s a shame because making lab rats the villains of a film about magical science opens up all kinds of questions. We have a perfect set of characters for talking about the cost of human progress. If a lab rat could speak about the horrific things done to him in the name of curing cancer5, if he could become the scientist himself and make the greatest minds his underlings, what might his goals be and why? Say this is in a world where nature has been excised, where every living creature is sickened from decades of industrial revolution? That’s fascinating, that’s promising, that has so much potential.
Spoilers End
I always wanted to be a scientist, not an artist, when I was a kid. I was so fascinated with everything that became possible at the cusp of a new millennium. I'm surprised it wasn't what everyone wanted to be. On another note, I like to think that the red gloves the scientists wear in the film is a sign of their culpability for some of the ills that afflict it.
Potential is interesting. So few films have it. When squandered, it can make a worse film than one that never had any at all. But it can also make your mind race, and if there’s enough of it, later your brain will race to a better ending than the film itself could manage. So half a great film and half a mediocre film plus the half you’ll write yourself equals...a film worth watching, if only so I have someone to talk to about it.
Avril et le monde truqué is a special film, and after writing this review I feel happier with it than I did upon leaving the theatre. It’s a celebration of science, of women in science, of the wonders of science, and it reminded me of picking up a fresh Tintin comic, but with far more interesting characters and settings.
*** Notice of bias:
- Anything with talking cats in it immediately makes me very, very happy. Sabrina the Teenage Witch was more like Salem the Talking Cat with Some Thumb Exercise on the FF Button.
- This film briefly mentions Canada. It was partially animated here so I wonder if that’s a little nod that we do, in fact, exist. We are so rarely a part of fictional universes that this makes me very, very happy as well.
1 Yeah, I know what you’re thinking - look, a little Marvel doesn’t hurt, okay? It’s mostly the spandex. It makes me uncomfortable. ↩
2 Presumably invincible soldiers are a great asset to any military, but invincible tax collectors may be something Europe would love to send to Greece.↩
3 How I suspect the Republican Party feels at the moment. Well, Lincoln’s Republican Party, anyway. ↩
4 What do these people think they’ll get out of ruling the world besides a lot of people complaining to you and a lot of messes to clean up all the time? You might as well volunteer to run a daycare for a hundred psychotic infants constantly trying to destroy each other and themselves. At least the s*** you’d clean up there would fit in a few grocery bags. Maybe they just think ruling the world means free foot massages and people curtsying to them a lot. We should just let them take over the world, get halfway through the first massage and then ask them ‘So, what are your plans for sorting out the Middle East? And how about the political corruption in Nigeria? I thought we could get to institutionalized racism in America after lunch and then we could tackle the Great Pacific garbage patch. Also, there are some people here who want to complain about their coffee being too hot and Mcdonald’s making them fat.” They’d resign by the weekend.↩
5 Or more likely helping some limp noodle get properly al dente↩
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