Directors – Neil Boyle, Kirk Hendry – 2023 – UK – Cert. PG – 85m
***1/2
A British boy and his dog are stranded on a desert island alongside a Japanese man looking after a colony of apes – animated adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s book is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 2nd
With his parents having lost their jobs, Michael (voice: Aaron McGregor) is sailing round the world with his family. They are somewhere in the Pacific. Mum (voice: Sally Hawkins) is the skipper, with dad (voice: Cillian Murphy), Michael’s elder sister Becky (voice: Raffey Cassidy) and Michael himself as crew. He is homesick, missing his dog Stella. Well, not missing her, actually, because he’s secretly smuggled her on board and has her holed up in the cupboard at the front of the deck. Which is why the ship’s supplies appear to be dwindling – he is sneaking her food out of them.
Michael is the misfit of the crew; you sense that the other three family members are enjoying the experience of the trip, but he’d rather be back at home. Mum and dad try to make him feel better – mum ordering him about as skipper but giving him time with her as “mum” to talk about anything that might be bothering him. Dad, meanwhile, issues him with a logbook to write about the journey, adding, somewhat sheepishly, “it was your mother’s idea.”
He’d like to be on watch at night, and on an evening when his sister is allotted the task, Michael talks her into letting him take over, cutting a deal involving him swabbing the deck for the next month. What he really wants is time alone on deck with Stella, but his idea doesn’t quite go to plan and the canine stowaway is revealed, with dad initially determined to leave the dog at the next port they visit. Stella’s presence melts dad’s resolve, though. And then one day, during a storm, Stella gets out onto the deck and Michael, less than sensibly slipping out of his life jacket to evade his parents’ attempts to stop him, goes to rescue her. In the process however, he and Stella are swept overboard. Michael manages to find Stella and keep her close by him in the water.
The pair wake washed up on a deserted beach. After sleeping beneath a cliff overnight, they wake next morning to find someone has prepared food for them. After a couple of days, they run into the Japanese man responsible. He seems to want the boy and dog to keep their distance, draws a boundary between himself and them in the sand, but later softens and allows the pair to enter his treehouse home. Kensuke (voice: Ken Watanabe), as he introduces himself, has built up trust with the tribe of orangutans in the jungle that borders the beach.
Missing his parents, Michael spots a ship on the beach one day, lighting a fire to attract attention. The horrified Kensuke puts it out. The reason, it turns out, is that the ship is carrying poachers intent on capturing specimens of the local wildlife. Sure enough his fears are confirmed, with an ape mother taken by the hunters leaving her small infant orphaned, with the man, the boy and the rest of the tribe having to look after him…
Frank Cottrell Boyce delivers a solid screenplay adaptation of children’s author Michael Morpurgo’s book, condensing the narrative to make it work well in a commendable 85 minutes. The voice actors are well cast (even if Murphy’s voice is a little too easily recognisable), with newcomer McGregor’s solid voice performance carrying the bulk of the piece.
Describing an animated movie as carried by its script and voice cast sounds a little odd, because while in this case that observation is absolutely accurate, the element of the film that seems flat is the character animation, which seems to do its job but little more. One could put that down to budget – this is clearly made with far less money than your average Disney or Hollywood animated movie outing, but more money doesn’t necessarily mean better or more effective animation.
More significantly, the animated characters lack the visual inventiveness of a Studio Ghibli or a Cartoon Saloon. There doesn’t appear to be any attempt to push the visual side of the animator’s art in the way you find in, say, that other animated, stranded on a desert island movie The Red Turtle (Michaël Dudok De Wit, 2016), the shapeshifter drama Wolfwalkers (Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart, 2020) or even TV spin-off, preschooler-targeted feature Puffin Rock and the New Friends (Jeremy Purcell, 2022). The film further has the misfortune to be released alongside this week’s reissue of one of the greatest movies ever made, animated or otherwise: My Neighbour Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988), which, probably on a similar budget, shows just how much can be done with character animation.
Alas, by comparison, Kensuke’s Kingdom feels like producer- or publisher-driven animated cinema – the story adaptation and cast are solid, yet the character animation feels almost like an afterthought.
Stranger still, the backdrops against which all this takes place – the sea, the ship, the tropical jungle beach, coast and inland – are realised with state-of-the-art computer and 2D effects animation trickery that makes the character animation look all the more pedestrian – even as the story being told and the actors voicing the characters enthral.
The maritime sailing vistas, the sea which looks to all intents and purposes like live action photography with animated boat and dive-bombing seabirds on top, the walk up a spiral staircase to Kensuke’s treehouse (and the later computer animated innovation of a pulley-operated lift for Stella) are all highlights.
The other element that’s striking – and I suspect it’s to do with Morpurgo’s original book – is that the story is essentially about goodness without ever feeling drippy or ineffectual, a quality few films achieve. You’ll ultimately be glad you spent time in the company of Michael, Stella and Kensuke.
Kensuke’s Kingdom is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, August 2nd.
Trailer: