French week-end
Hollywood seems to have monopolized the production of full-length animated movies over the past few years. The same devices, typical heroes are supplied on screen in a conveyer order. Nonetheless exclusions do happen. One of them has just been released: it is the French animated movie Cendrillon au Far West shown in 3D.
Pascal Herold, the director and head of the eponymous studio has a vast experience of a producer, computer games developer and script writer for other movies. Cendrillon is his second work as a director. He debuted in 2009 with Puss in Boots, which was perceived by admirers of Disney entertainment in a less than ambiguous way, still finding its audience, though not so numerous as it was planned at the beginning.
Cendrillon is apparently a French reply to the limitless number of many-million-worth and gathering millions of audience “animal” sagas like Shark Tale, Over the Edge, Ice Age, etc. All heroes are animals with human habits, characters, and flaws. The turmoil in the godforsaken savanna starts when the train carrying Russian prince Vladimir (a dog) and his elderly duchess aunt, is attacked by robbers headed by a pirate gorilla (hello to Ice Age 4). Cinderella (who looks like a feline, but the author’s drawing style is only two specific at certain places), an indomitable beauty, sick and tired of boring backwoods, is really excited by the adventures. In the course of a fight, Cinderella hits someone with a chair and gets a right cross in the face, as a result the tooth she loses helps the prince find the unknown female warrior, who won him at first glance.
On the whole, some places in the movie, like the mole suffering from claustrophobia, are funny, yet unoriginality, compared with the overseas samples, is very distinctly felt in the diolagues, the way the characters are outlined, and fighting scenes. Anyway, the movie is quite inetersting, at least for the reason that it is French. Together with another French movie, a family comedy Sur la piste du Marsupilami, it can make a nice cinema weekend, European style. By the way, it is the height of summer vacations, besides, there are no interesting premieres in the offing.
