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Tales Of The Night REVIEWED BY MIKE GOODRIDGE
In Tales Of The Night (Les Contes De La Nuit), French animation master Michel Ocelot returns to the same format as his 2000 film Princes And Prin- cesses (Princes Et Princesses), itself a compilation of short fairy tales in silhouette from his short-lived 1989 TV series Ciné Si. The six new short stories possess plenty of the charm, wit and visual bold- ness for which his films are celebrated, but only newcomers to Ocelot’s work will be filled with wonder. For aficionados, very little seems fresh here, and even some of the tales feel like rehashes of his previous work. Ocelot’s fame should make the film a success in
France when it opens in July and international sales will be strong, especially to buyers who took Azur Et Asmar (2006) or the Kirikou films; Oce- lot’s DVD and TV value is timeless, and easily suited to redubbing in local languages. In an age of multiple-thousand screen releases
for Pixar and DreamWorks titles, however, these classical tales are bound to find a niche in the spe- cialised arena. The portmanteau nature of the concept and the silhouetted characters will ham- per the chances of a wide acceptance among kids used to the digestible long form and easy visuals of Toy Story 3 and Tangled.
n 16 Screen International in Berlin February 14, 2011 COMPETITION
Fr. 2011. 84mins Director/screenplay/ storyboard Michel Ocelot Production companies Nord-Ouest Films, Studio O, StudioCanal, CNC, La Région Ile de France International sales StudioCanal, www.
studiocanal.com Producers Christophe Rossignon, Philip Boeffard Editor Patrick Ducruet Music Christian Maire Main voice cast Julien Beramis, Marine Griset, Michel Elias, Firmine Richard
Tales Of The Night is presented in 3D, though
for a film told with silhouettes, the device does not add much visual enhancement. The imagery and colours are ravishing enough, and a 2D ver- sion is also available. Fans of Princes And Princesses will know the
drill: at a cinema every night, a young boy and girl meet with an elderly technician to dress up and act out stories. They come up with the settings, time periods and stories and then, courtesy of a little bit of magic, are dressed and inserted into the tales themselves. The first tale, ‘The Werewolf ’, is the story of two
sisters in love with the same prince. He becomes engaged to the older one, much to the sadness of the younger one, who has loved him all her life. However, when the prince announces to his fian- cée that he is in fact a werewolf, she abandons him and locks him forever in his wolf state. In the Caribbean-flavoured ‘Ti Jean And Belle-
Sans-Connaitre’, a boy called Ti Jean finds himself in the land of the dead, where he must appease a giant bee, mongoose and iguana in order to win the heart of Belle-Sans-Connaitre. In ‘The Chosen One And The City Of Gold’, set
in Aztec times, a young man arrives in the city of gold on the day when a beautiful young girl is to be chosen as a human sacrifice to the monster
which protects the city. The man resolves to break the cycle of killing. The fourth story, ‘Boy Tam-Tam’, sees Ocelot
come back to the Africa of Kirikou. A would-be tam-tam player is dismissed by everyone in his vil- lage until he learns how to play the magic tam- tam, which will save them from their enemies. In ‘The Boy Who Never Lied’, set in Tibet, the
king of Tibet makes a bet with a neighbouring monarch that the boy who rides the nation’s talk- ing horse cannot be made to lie. The monarch enlists his beautiful daughter to hatch a devious plan which will force him to lie. The final tale, ‘The Doe-Girl And The Archi-
tect’s Son’, which bears some similarities to Azur Et Asmar, sees a young man seek out a fairy to transform his fiancée back to human form after she is turned into a doe by a jealous sorcerer. Each setting is gorgeously rendered and the
backgrounds and colours are stunning. The voice cast gives it their all, while the preparatory rituals — the discussions about each story, the dressing of the boy and girl by the costume machine, the hoot- ing owl in the cinema — have a repetitive appeal which acts as the glue between the stories.
SCREEN SCORE ★★
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