Director – Alex Tsitsilin – 2023 – UK, Cyprus – Cert. PG – 94m
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Her true love must rescue the princess before three rival princes after a dragon abducts her on behalf of an evil wizard – fairy tale animation is out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 25th
A dad reads his small daughter a bedtime story, a fairytale about a kingdom where an evil dragon carries off innocent princesses, sometimes as they are about to be married. I’d never stand for that, intones young Mina (voice: Alyson Leigh Rosenfeld), who is herself a princess, and her father a king (voice: David Wills).
Jump forward to her as a young woman hanging out with architecture graduate boyfriend Ronan (voice: Dan Edwards), despite the fact that her more traditional father thinks she ought to marry a foreign prince for political reasons. As Ronan points out, he can handle all the design stuff like strategy, construction and weaponry while she is better at hands on combat, so they make a good pair to rule the kingdom.
There are three princely candidates in the offing: strong but brutish Eastern European Rogdai (voice: Matt Giroveanu), vain Indian ladies’ man Kezabor (voice: Pete Zarustica), and overeating, obese, Oriental Fa Chan (voice: Brian Kim) who is in thrall to his Mommy Dearest (voice: Jennifer Sun Bell).
Mina accepts Ronan’s proposal of marriage, and is delighted when her father agrees on the grounds that his daughter’s happiness is the most important consideration. The three princes are, however, less than impressed. At her wedding announcement banquet, Ronan is unable to prevent her being snatched from their balcony and carried off by a dragon. With the king rethinking and offering his daughter’s hand to any man that can rescue her, the three princes set out on their quests to do so.
And so too does Ronan. Entering a dark forest, he uses his intelligence and knowledge to rescue the last of the Bjorn Talking Bears (voice: Jon St. John) from a large constrictor snake before running into Finn (voice: Abe Goldfarb), who informs him that the dragon is the sorceress Nahina (voice: Vanessa Johansson) he once bewitched to love him until her discovery of his spell turned her against him in particular and humanity in general.
She now serves the evil wizard Kabir (voice: Anthony Sardinha). As Mina has discovered, Kabir has turned numerous, previously abducted princesses who wouldn’t do what he wanted into gold figures which now stand as statues in his palace gardens. She searches for a way to undo their enchantment in order to help them escape. She is, however, unaware that the only entrance to the castle is guarded by a giant (voice: Marc Thompson)…
The screenplay deftly juggles familiar fairy tale archetypes in a fresh combination; the offer of a princess’ hand in return for success at an appointed task, rivals for a princess’ affections, true love, a shapeshifting witch who alternates between dragon, serpent and human, rival wizards, a talking bear, a giant, and so on.
It’s perhaps on less secure ground when it tries to deal with female empowerment: Mina wants to be the equal of men, but that doesn’t stop a dragon abducting her (admittedly, the dragon turns out to be female, but she works for a male villain). Once captured, although she makes a token escape attempt, she effectively waits around for her prince – with whom she discussed equality (or at least complementarity) in an early scene – to come and rescue her.
A decade ago, director Tsitsilin was making lacklustre fairy tale animated features such as entries in Russia’s The Snow Queen series, where the limitations of the animation software led to direly executed (and near unwatchable) animation. There’s a slight trace of that here, but either the software is vastly improved, his ability to get what he wants from it has grown immeasurably, or the budget has greatly increased.
The animation still feels a little clunky, but nothing like as much as back in the day and to nothing like the detriment of the overall feel. The animation may not flow as well as in films by Disney, Pixar, Ghibli, and others, but the script with which Tsitsilin is working here is far stronger, and the results overall greatly improved.
Overall, the film is pleasing to look at and the characters engaging. If the quality of the animation makes it feel like an animation B-feature on occasion, a deep understanding of fairy tale archetypes bolstered by clever and inventive plotting go a long way to compensate.
Rebellious is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, October 25th.
Trailer:
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