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Review: AZUR AND ASMAR: THE PRINCES’ QUEST/ Michel Ocelot (2006)

February 16th, 2009 by Scott Marks

Azur and Asmar: The Princes’ Quest (2006)
Written and Directed by Michel Ocelot
Running Time: 99 min.

Rating: ★★½☆☆

Azur and Asmar is a typical “Once upon a Time…”/Arabian Nights fairy tale dressed in garish colors and eye-grabbing patterns that can only do so much to camouflage the lack of story. The busy computer generated backgrounds and rigid character movement make it feel like you’re reading a storybook on a giant computer screen.

When we first meet them, Azur and Asmar are mere babes feeding off Jénane’s breasts. Jénane, who is Asmar’s mother and Azur’s nanny, raises the boys like brothers even though one is dark-skinned and the other looks like a member of Hitler’s League of German Worker Youth. The boys are constantly scrapping and each clash ends exactly the same: Azur’s dour, aristocratic father appears from nowhere to break things up. A fistfight in a dung heap proves to be too much for the nobleman to bear. Before Azur can say goodbye to Jénane and his friend (and wash the meadow muffins from his hair), he’s strapped to a tutor and sent to the big city. Jénane and Asmar are thrown to the curb and allowed to keep just the clothes on their backs.

Some of the dialogue is obvious even for a kid’s film. How is this for an exposition inducer: Fading in from a passage of time, the first words out of the father’s mouth are, “Azur, you’re a grown man now. What will you do with your life?” Azur wants to travel across the sea to liberate the Djinn Fairy, a magical princess who was the subject of Jénane’s bedtime stories. He sets sail and winds up shipwrecked in a land where blue eyed people are thought to be demons. What’s an Aryan to do but go through life pretending he’s blind? Only after he is reunited with Jénane and Asmar does Azur once again open his eyes, and the two young men set out to find the Djinn Fairy.

The majority of the animation is surprisingly flat with very little movement in and out of the frame. Apart from holy books, mosques, mosaics and 1,500 thread count Egyptian sheets, the film borrows much of its background design from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. A couple of winged elves, reminiscent of Cinderella‘s Godmothers,  are the only non-human creations in this colorful animated universe. The cut-out character movement is stiff and unconvincing. Much detail has been paid to the characters faces leaving other parts of their anatomy looking like dangling Colorform spheres. With the exception of one manic Disney-fied moppet (Princess Chamsous Sabah), there isn’t much visual wit in any of these characters. Crappoux, a street merchant who acts as Azur’s “eyes” in addition to the film’s other source of comic relief, comes off like a flaccid Phil Silvers.

Continue reading Review: AZUR AND ASMAR: THE PRINCES’ QUEST/ Michel Ocelot (2006)

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John Boorman to direct CG version of WIZARD OF OZ

November 5th, 2008 by Scott Marks

I need another remake of The Wizard of Oz like I need a head in my hole. Instead of throwing telephones, I find myself oddly excited for the director attached to the project is the infallible John Boorman.

Boorman has never made a bad film and his Tailor of Panama remains my favorite film of the decade. Forget about Daniel Craig and the rest of them: Pierce Brosnan is #2 in the Bond hierarchy and TOP is the best 007 film since Sean Connery quit the franchise. (And please don’t leave comments informing me that TOP is not a Bond picture. If you don’t get what I’m inferring, go back to your booger-coated stack of graphic novels.)

The $25 million feature, co-written by Boorman, Ron Mita and Jim McClain (Robots), is already in pre-production. Laurent Rodon and Claude Gorvsky at France’s Films Actions and Boorman’s longtime associate Kieran Corrigan will produce.

Several animators/cartoonists turned live-action directors (Frank Tashlin, Federico Fellini, Tim Burton) come to mind. Are there any directors out there that started with humans before taking the squash-and-stretch route? There’s Joe Dante’s wonderful Looney Tunes: Back in Action, but it’s my assumption that Joe worked with flesh and blood and left the ink and paint for the animators. The announcement in Variety doesn’t mention whether Oz will use motion capture similar to Robert Zemeckis’ Polar Express. Let’s hope that Boorman doesn’t emulate Richard Linklater’s woeful rotoscoped movements.

Boorman’s English-language adaptation will remain true to the original’s characters and settings, but unlike the MGM classic, it’s not a musical. The film is scheduled for a Summer 2010 release.

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