Mark Reviews Movies: POUPELLE OF CHIMNEY TOWN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 29, 2021

The sky of the town is filled with smoke. Indeed, the entire concept of the sky or the stars or anything above that thick layer of dark ash has disappeared from the collective memory of this place. The screenplay of Poupelle of Chimney Town seems to be making a pretty obvious point about the current state of the environment and our collective denial about the problem, and sure, that's there in this animated tale. It's mostly, though, an entertaining and heartfelt adventure about curiosity, freedom, and a creature made of trash.

It's best, perhaps, not to look too deeply into the moral, the message, or the allegorical components of Akihiro Nishino's screenplay, which he adapted from his picture book. The smoke is almost a red herring in terms of meaning, despite how prevalent and all-encompassing it may be to the look, the plot, and the specific details of this film. There's a bit more going on beneath the surface of this story, just as there are levels to this town and so much more to the world outside the haze that envelops it.

Our young hero is Lubicchi (voice of Antonio Raul Corbo), a boy who works as a chimney sweep for the town's many, many smokestacks—despite his fear of heights. One of the benefits of first-time director Yusuke Hirota's style, which uses computer animation throughout, is how the filmmakers (the director, along with a team of artists from Japan's Studio 4ºC) give us these rich, moving shots of the vast, towering city. There's a sense of this place as both a functioning locale—with trains, its division of those above and those below, and a rather complicated garbage disposal facility—and a representation of industrial hubris for its own sake.

While they're also created by use of computer animation (The smoothness of motion and the ease with they move with the camera make it apparent), the characters still have an appearance and feeling of traditional, hand-drawn art. That approach works for Lubicchi and the other human characters in this story, with their cartoon-ish and/or whimsical appearances, movements, and costumes (The kid's be-suited and top-hat-wearing miniature frame is adorably twee). It's most effective in the design of the eponymous character—a creature formed by some glowing rock that crashes into the town's landfill. The stone creates a vortex, gathering and spinning trash into the form of the walking, talking Poupelle (voiced by a kindly and dryly amusing Tony Hale).

Poupelle has the basic shape of a person, although the specific limbs, joints, and appendages are created by random pieces of garbage lined up in that fashion (His head seems to be a pair of connected buckets, with the openings creating a mouth, and his hat is an umbrella—just to name a couple of details). There's an inherently endearing quality to the creature, who first believes he's perfectly normal among the town's population (His first encounter with people comes with a Halloween parade), only to quickly discover that everyone thinks he's a monster.

Lubicchi rescues the "garbage man" from an incinerator, in a hectic and humorous series of action setpieces that might give one a false sense of how busy this story will be (Everything more or less settles down, spends time with the characters, and develops the world until a climactic battle/escape). The boy hides Poupelle from the town's local Inquisitors, who ensure that nothing from the outside world enters the space or even the minds of the population. Soon, the two form a sweet bond, revolving around Lubicchi's belief in a sky above the smoke and the disappearance of his father (voiced by Stephen Root in flashbacks), whose insistence of the existence of an outside world put him on the wrong side of the Inquisitors.

The rest of the plot has Poupelle hiding, while Lubicchi gradually works up the courage and a plan to prove his missing-and-presumed-dead father correct. Finally, a couple of secrets about the origin of the town and its strange economy based on decaying money are revealed, and we also a few supporting characters along the way (Hasan Minhaj provides the voice of Scoop, a "mine bandit" with a bad habit of blabbering his and other people's secrets, and everyone else—including Lubicchi's asthma-stricken mother, voiced by Misty Lee—is pretty much extraneous).

Since so much of the central point is kept hidden, much of the film's thematic intent, which starts as a straightforward parable about pollution and transforms into a more confused one (It features wealth inequality, a totalitarian state, and a vague fight for freedom with a vaguely easy solution), becomes messy. The action-heavy climax, which has Lubicchi and Poupelle trying to take to the skies that they're certain are there in a wrecked ship, is staged well (There's also a particularly touching moment in which Poupelle's purpose for the still-grieving boy is made plainly evident), but it doesn't do justice to the enticing but ultimately thin ideas within Nishino's tale.

These are significant issues from a storytelling perspective, perhaps, but there's little denying that Hirota and his team have created an imaginative place, filled it with colorful characters, and brought the whole thing to clever, warm, and inventive life. The big heart, detailed aesthetics, and skillful animation of Poupelle of Chimney Town make up for whatever flaws and shortcomings may exist in this plot and its half-considered ideas.

Note: The film is being released in the United States in two forms: with the original Japanese dialogue and, as reviewed here, an English-language dub.

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