![]() And suddenly, 70 years of the past collide wildly with the present, and send April, Darwin, Julius, and Pizoni off on a reckless adventure.Īpril and the Extraordinary World takes a faintly hilarious and kid-friendly tack on the entire idea of science, as one giant, homogenous field that passes down hereditary lines, and is also just this side of pure magic. #IN THE DEEP MOVIE 2016 REVIEW SERIES#Pizoni, still fixated on her family, sends a hapless young thief named Julius (Marc-André Grondin) to spy on her, just as a series of breakthroughs change her life considerably. ![]() A decade later, April is a bitter obsessive, living in an immense, hollowed-out public statue with her talking cat Darwin (Philippe Katerine), the result of a failed experiment. But an officious detective named Pizoni (Benoît Brière) tracks them down to conscript them into France's weapons program, and the family is torn apart. April (voiced by Marion Cotillard) is a child eager to assist her parents, Annette and Paul (Macha Grenon and Olivier Gourmet), and her grandfather Pops (Jean Rochefort, wonderful as ever) in their research. Instead, the story focuses on a family of scientists hiding from the French government, and working on an elixir to end aging and death. But directors Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci, working from a script by Ekinci and Benjamin Legrand, keep the tone light and the action high. There's a metaphor in all this about the modern dependence on oil, governmental apathy about climate change and pollution, and the dangers of public disinterest in scientific research. By 1931, steam and charcoal power still dominate, and the industrialized world is stuck scrabbling over lumber and living under oppressive clouds of soot.Īll the big, thrilling action hides a sneaky little metaphor Then the world's most famous and innovative scientists-≎instein, Marconi, Nobel, Pasteur, and others-start disappearing, and scientific innovation drags to a halt, leaving the world stuck in an era before oil or atomic power. The disaster undermines the war effort, and Napoleon IV signs a peace treaty with Prussia, altering the course of history. April and the Extraordinary World starts in 1870, just before the Franco-Prussian War, with a scientific catastrophe during an effort to create monstrous super-soldiers for the armies of Napoleon III. And both films follow plucky heroines with a marked impatience toward the world around them. The film's story was inspired by the comics of Jacques Tardi, who contributed art and wound up with a credit for "creating the visual universe." That universe bears little resemblance to his other film adaptation, Luc Besson's florid The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec, except in that both of them take place in alternate, steampunk versions of the past. April isn’t afraid of holding the audience’s hand a bit, but it still leaves plenty of surprises for each stop along the way. That’s one reason the French animated film April and the Extraordinary World is so surprising and satisfying: it takes up the outsized creativity and puckish humor of the best French fantasy comics, but couples it with a straight-line plot that makes surprisingly logical sense, at least for a tall tale featuring lizards in robot suits and an immortal talking cat. But the dream logic often makes the characters less accessible, and leaves viewers scrambling to keep up rather than following along with the building tension. The outlandish film adaptations of French comics like The Triplets Of Belleville or The Rabbi’s Cat are a blast in their own way. There are upsides and downsides to this style. From serious world-builders like Jean Giraud, Jean-David Morvan, and Christophe Blain to more playful fantastists like Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim to historic genre-influencers like Hergé and Peyo, comic creators working in the French tradition tend to wander all over the landscape, and there’s no predicting from the start of a story where it might go in the end. Read enough Franco-Belgian comics, especially in the fantasy / science-fiction / horror genre, and you’ll start to recognize a shared tone: a certain mix of straight-faced humor and a wild, almost improvised-feeling narrative. ![]()
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