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DILILI IN PARIS
Director: Michel Ocelot Cast: The voices of Prunelle Charles-Ambron, Enzo Ratsito, Natalie Dessay, Bruno Paviot, Jérémy Lopez MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:35 Release Date: 10/4/19 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 3, 2019 Writer/director Michel Ocelot's Dilili in Paris definitely has a target audience in mind. This is an animated movie, set at the beginning of the 20th century in the eponymous city, filled with people of historical and cultural import. With its stilted and repetitive pieces of expository dialogue, Ocelot clearly has a child audience in mind. Once we realize this, the movie's virtues become easier to grasp, although the material's dark and transparently political turns seem a bit much in that context. The heroine is Dilili (voice of Prunelle Charles-Ambron), a performer in a recreation of a foreign village in the park. In reality, she's prim and proper, always greeting strangers formally and with a curtsy. A young man named Orel (voice of Enzo Ratsito) offers to take her on a tour of Paris. Meanwhile, young girls are being abducted by a mysterious group of criminals called the Male Masters, who are terrified of changing society. The plot, which has the clever Dilili and the ambitious Orel looking for clues about the missing girls, is just an excuse for these characters to see assorted locations and to meet assorted luminaries of the time. From a visual standpoint, the movie is a minor marvel, with Ocelot using computer animation to seamlessly blend artistic representations of parts of the city with other backdrops that look like photographs of the age, given color and dimension. The characters, although rendered in 3-D with computers, have the simplicity of design and movement of traditional, hand-drawn animation. As for those luminaries, they include artists (assorted Impressionists, Pablo Picasso, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who joins the pair at the Moulin Rouge), opera singer Emma Calvé (who practices in an underground lake beneath the opera house), actor Sarah Bernhardt, scientist Marie Curie, and Gustave Eiffel, who lives in an apartment atop his tower. On a superficial level, they're here to offer clues, but there's enough discussion of these figures' importance to make the movie a fun, little history lesson, too. When the plot involving the Male Masters takes over, though, Dilili in Paris becomes less fun by multiple degrees. It's not only the movie's content, which shows the group's wicked plans to subjugate girls and women, but also its tone, which approaches the plan with deserved but (probably for kids) frightening dread, and method, which becomes as repetitive as the dialogue. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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