Directors – Alois di Leo, Sergio Machado – 2024 – Brazil, India – Cert. U – 96m
**
Two musical performing mice attempt to board Noah’s Ark, where a despotic lion and his thuggish entourage attempt to lord it over the other animals in a singing contest –animated feature is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 23rd
Two mice – Tommy (voice: Marcelo Adnet) who sings and his accompanist pal Vini (voice: Rodrigo Santoro) who plays a four-string guitar – appear to be at the pinnacle of success, but when the lights go down, they are revealed to be playing the empty bar of Mrs Ferret (voice: Rachel Butera), from which they’re unceremoniously ejected.
On the lam, one of them overhears an old man in the desert wilderness remonstrating with a voice in the sky at its wits end – “I tried my best, it says, but what’s a God to do?” – and being instructed as per the Biblical myth to build an ark and fill it with male and female members of each animal species. “How do I tell the animals?”, asks the bewildered Noah (voice: Ian James Corlett), for it is he. “Well,” says God (voice: Luis Bermudez) in a rare moment of wit uncharacteristic of the screenplay overall, “I can get the invitations out.” Cue flocks of blue-winged birds delivering leaflets to likely pairs of animals, targeted with military precision.
Cue also a purple snake couple informing their boss Baruk the lion (voice: Keith Silverstein) – weirdly, his accompanying lioness is never more than an undeveloped background presence – of all this, and him wanting his invite. If the character is badly ripped off Disney’s The Lion King (Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff, 1994), he’s less of a legitimate ruler and more like the villain, the pretender Scar, albeit lacking the charisma.
So the stage – or the ark – is set for the Lion and his elitist group of thuggish henchmen – who also include a vegetarian gorilla with, curiously, no mate, and a hyena couple – to lord it over the other animals. Noah and his wife Ruth (voice: Debra Wilson) barely appear (incidentally, she is black, tantalisingly presenting the couple as mixed race, although little use is made of her character), except for Noah to send out a dove named Sonia (voice: Triya Leong) who is lacking in self-confidence in the company of trusted blue bird leader named, in a bizarre nod to Apocalypse Now (Francis Coppola, 1979), Colonel Kilgore (voice: also Luis Bermudez) – the only one of scores of birds seen earlier to be animated in anything like close-up, and, again, without a mate.
The two birds court disaster when the first land they find turns out to be a pink whale, but fortunately the latter knows where land is and helps them out by taking them there. The main representative of Noah’s family is his small daughter Susana (voice: Lala McCann), but her role in the narrative, despite being given considerable screen time, amounts to very little.
All of that, though, is very much a sideshow to the main plot about a singing contest between the animals. The prize isn’t entirely clear, except that if the lion wins, that will put him in a position where he can lord it over all the other animals. Oh, and he’s tone-deaf, so bullied the two mice into voicing him from behind a curtain while he mimes. To achieve this, he he kidnaps Nina (voice: Alice Braga) – the lone female mouse inexplicably among the animals who boarded the vessel – threatening to have her eaten should they fail to comply with his wishes.
The two mice, meanwhile, have also been talked by impresario roach Alfonso (voice: Christopher Corey Smith) into a strategy not unlike the scam central to the far funnier The Producers (Mel Brooks, 1967) whereby they write sure-fire winning songs for the other animal contestants, with, clearly, only one of their songs able to actually win.
Inspired (if that’s the right word) by the poems Noah’s Ark by Vinicius de Moraes, this Brazilian-Indian, CG animated co-production manages to take the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark, shift it away from Noah to refocus it around two anthropomorphised mice who perform as a musical duo by way of a song contest loosely reminiscent of Sing (Garth Jennings, Christophe Lourdelet, 2016) and its sequel. The Noah’s Ark trailer makes it look like the results might be fun, but the perfunctory animation doesn’t work so well outside the quick cuts of the trailer’s rapid-fire editing and proves something of a slog to watch in the context of a longer, feature length.
Potentially, there are some good ideas here, notably that if two species of every kind were put on the ark, the natural predators and overlords might refuse to play ball. This might have been developed into, say, an Orwellian, Animal Farm type fable, but it gets stuck trying to keep the mice as the central protagonists. If the songs, character design and animation had been inspired rather than insipid, this might have worked, but as it is, the whole thing mostly feels cheap, lacking the sort of low budget inventiveness that can cause such productions, in the right hands, to spring to life.
There are, nevertheless, occasional, striking moments. The gorilla uses a live woodpecker’s beak to pick a lock or hurling the bird at some tied rope which, once severed, causes a section of the ark to collapse leaving a gaping hole inside. Birds do a circular Busby Berkeley routine in the sky at the end. Alas, such inventiveness is too sparse to render the film overall watchable. From the trailer, it looked as though it might have been something very special. Sadly, it isn’t.
Noah’s Ark is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, August 23rd. It is being shown in an English dubbed version. It is unclear whether the film was released in Brazil in a Brazilian Portuguese version, but it is likely that it was.
Trailer: