Movie reviews: 'Princesse Dragon', 'Dragonkeeper', 'Even Mice Belong in Heaven', 'The Concierge', 'Mars Express'

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It's a flood of reviews! Today's trailers are for:

Princesse Dragon,
Dragonkeeper,
Even Mice Belong in Heaven,
The Concierge,
and Mars Express.

Those are in increasing order of recommendation. The first three are for kids, the fourth is anime, and the last one isn't furry but is worth mentioning!

Princesse Dragon (2021)

This is a French 2D animated film, written and directed by Anthony Roux and Jean-Jacques Denis, produced by Ankama. At 70 minutes, it's pretty short.

A dragon with a large hoard of treasure wants a family, but he's single, so he goes to the Frog-Witch (a woman with the head of a frog) and makes a conditional arrangement. Soon he has three eggs, two of which hatch into baby dragons, and the third into a weird light green human girl with huge masses of hair. While venturing into the woods, "Bristle" is befriended by a princess who invites her to the nearby city, ruled by her father, a selfish king. The rest of the story is a typical fairy tale.

This was an OK watch, but I can't really recommend it here for a couple of reasons. It's aimed at young kids, and is pretty ham-fisted with messages: greed, selfishness and trophy hunting are bad, don't abandon your family, don't think that women should "know their place" and enforce this by locking your wife up in a tower, etc. Furry-wise, we don't see enough of the dragons. The Frog-Witch and some other animal characters only make brief appearances. The big dragon is well-drawn, though kind of lumpy.

What I liked most in the film were the presense of not one, but two female protagonists, the fairy tale story structure, and the dragon dad had a good character arc (even though we seldom got to see him). The background art of the forest was good too, quite Ghibli-esque! And Bristle has a very unexpected way of coping with stress.

The main reason I can't recommend this film is its astonishing unavailability. I can't find any DVDs or streaming copies - even in France! I found a pirated copy, and although YouTube has clips with English subtitles, I had to settle for a closed-captioning file in French, then used Google to translate it into English. The film's not bad - but it's also not worth all that trouble. IMDB gives it a rating of 7.1, based on less than 200 votes.

Dragonkeeper (2024)

This is a 98-minute computer-animated film for kids, adapted from the first book in the Dragonkeeper series by Australian author Carole Wilkinson. She's credited as one of the screenwriters (along with four other people), but only the very beginning and end of the film seem to match the book; most of it is substantially different. It was a multi-studio Spanish-Chinese production directed by Salvador Simó and Jianping Li.

Set in a fantasy version of ancient China, Ping is a young slave girl who learns that she's a dragonkeeper, a kind of "chosen one" helper of dragon-kind with magic Chi powers. Danzi, an elderly dragon who escapes from his prison after the death of his mate, travels with Ping to carry a rare dragon egg to a special pool where it can hatch, beset by the evil personal goals of Diao, an advisor to the Emperor.

Despite a budget of around $25 million USD, the film didn't make back anything near that. It's hard to articulate why it doesn't work. Watching it, it feels like the potential ingredients are there. Much of the story isn't explained in any satisfying way; Diao's motivations and Ping's origins are barely discussed. At one point, Ping outright asks Danzi all the important story questions, and none of them are answered except for a vague explanation of Chi, which in the film is whatever magic power it needs to be to help the plot.

And despite having a decent budget, the film producers made several cost-cutting decisions. Don't want to animate the dragon talking? No problem, use telepathy. Have a dramatic moment of action? Make the first half occur off-screen, then cut to the aftermath. Which is distracting, because your brain goes "Wha?" and then you have to figure out what happened, usually in the middle of other things going on. It's a weird thing to do because otherwise the budget was well-used to create textures and atmosphere. There's a deliberate recurring visual motif in which characters appear small in the middle of the screen, surrounded by space.

Also, the narrative is just... well, I wouldn't say it was depressing or overly dark; but it lacks light-hearted moments. Sure, there are some bits here and there, but they're fleeting, and aren't used to pace out the story. There aren't many points of tonal relief. Ping's sidekick Hua-Hua, a pet rat, is obviously meant to provide some humour, but doesn't help much in that regard.

Did I like anything in the film? Yes, I liked the atmosphere, and I liked Danzi, who's a good, serious noodle dragon! Except for his wings, which are impractically thin, wispy and barely visible when they're folded up. Still, I'm biased towards Danzi because he was voice-acted by Bill Nighy, an actor I like. (Most of the English voice cast have British accents.) Minor spoiler: late in the film, dragon fans may appreciate a demonic dragon transformation - remembering of course that half of it will not be on-screen. And you do get to see a bebeh dragon briefly, who is adorbs!

Alas, the film doesn't so much end, it just kind of... stops. Without closure on a couple of things. So I wouldn't particularly recommend this film, unless you're a fan of eastern-style dragons, and are willing to overlook the film's flaws. It's available for streaming in the U.S. on Hulu, Apple TV, and Amazon. IMDB rates it a 5.6, Rotten Tomatoes 67/64.

Even Mice Belong in Heaven (2021)

This is an 87-minute Czech film with an English dub (I Myši patří do nebe), based on a book by Iva Procházková, adapted by Alice Nellis, Richard Malatinský and Jeffrey Hylton, directed by Jan Bubeníček and Denisa Grimmová, and co-produced by several animation studios. It's for young kids.

It's stop-motion animation! You know, like Fantastic Mr. Fox! Whizzy is a young mouse living under the reputation of her deceased father, a local folk hero who confronted a fox. Bragging about her courage, Whizzy is not taken seriously by the other forest animals, so she attempts to follow in her father's footsteps - only for her and a fox (named Whitebelly) to get hit by a car and finding themselves in heaven.

Not Christianity's heaven, but a kind of afterlife for animals. It's not clear who's in charge, but there is an agenda - at first subtle then more direct - to help souls recognize and confront their personal flaws. It's possible to fail at this, and you see at least one soul being taken away, their fate unknown.

My issue is... well, I feel like I'm being "greymuzzle yells at cloud" here - I didn't like Whizzy's personality at all. I understood where it was coming from, but I hated her behavior, which was frequently emotionally abusive towards Whitebelly. I had to watch the film in 10-minute segments, until she finally understood herself three-quarters of the way in. Also I wasn't a big fan of the puppet design they used for mice.

Ignoring Whizzy, otherwise it was charming! It wasn't afraid to get dark, either. I felt so sorry for Whitebelly's situation, his timidity and stutter. And with Whizzy's help (despite her earlier abuse) he makes it in the end.

There were a couple of weird things. A few animals get human teeth (eww); there's a surprisingly camp gay raccoon; and several jokes about mouse pellets. Getting confrontational can make someone kind of... inflate? And there's one song (sung badly, then sung well). On the positive side, the stop-motion animation was quite good, and the location sets were really detailed. There was definitely love and creativity put into this!

And it's all animals, so it's very furry! You see several of the same souls later, while everyone's on their personal journeys. There's a kind of comfortable familiarity when you see them again. There's a cockatoo guide (or possibly trickster?) you meet a couple of times, and at one point an entertainingly angry badger.

Mostly I'd recommend this one to furry animation fans, if you don't mind kid's films. Your tolerance of Whizzy may be a lot better than mine! It's available on Apple TV, Amazon, and possibly some other services. It's rated 6.6 on IMDB (I think that's a bit unfairly low), and 100/89 on Rotten Tomatoes (which feels a bit too high).

The Concierge (2023)

This is a 70-minute anime film (also known as The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store, 北極百貨店のコンシェルジュさん, or Hokkyoku Hyakkaten no Concierge-san) adapted by Satomi Ôshima from the manga by Tsuchika Nishimura, and directed by Yoshimi Itazu at Production I.G.

Akino is a young (human) woman and new customer-service hire at a prestigious luxury department store that caters to animals - current, endangered and extinct. Most of the staff are human, and you don't see what things are like outside the store, so I don't understand how this story universe works.

In another "greymuzzle yells at cloud" moment, I don't really like Akino - she's the anime stereotype of constantly apologizing due to annoyingly low self-confidence, is mildly clumsy, while also being super-kind and eager to please. She's expected to devote herself 150% to her job and to never, ever make mistakes or leave customers unhappy (while working in retail). She hasn't yet learned how to deflect, or how to say "no" without saying no. So she makes promises that frequently require her co-workers' help.

Her co-workers are pretty nice, but the floor manager Mr. Todo is super-critical and has a way of materializing from anywhere. In any rational society, he would be arrested for harassment and stalking. There's also an upper manager, a bird, with a thing for getting physically kicked on his butt so he can slide across the marble floors on his belly.

Most of the film is a series of vignettes involving solving the problems of various animal customers, rather than a continuous narrative. And the whole thing is super furry! There are lots of different animals walking around in the background; the animators must have really had fun throwing in so many different species!

So of all the furry films here, despite my dislike of Akino, this is the one I recommend the most! It's short, mildly cute, and it also greatly helps that it's aimed at a higher age bracket. Avoid it if you don't like Akino's personality or the tacit support of capitalism.

But where to watch it? Well, Crunchyroll has the rights in the U.S. to screen it in select theaters, and then... no idea. I'm hoping there'll be an official sub or a dub before the end of 2024. As usual, I had to make do with a pirated copy, then found subtitles in French and Google translated them to English, which had the unfortunate side-effect of making everyone refer to Akino's job as being a janitor. IMDB gives it a score of 6.5, and MyAnimeList gives 7.35.

Mars Express (2023)

This is not a furry film, but it impressed me so much, I want to promote it. Except for the ending. I absolutely hated the ending. But the rest of it - wow! Mars Express first caught people's attention back in 2019 when they released this preview clip, and now, four years later, it's done!

It's an 89-minute 2D animated film from France, and it's very science-fictional, with a lot of neo-noir and cyberpunk mixed in. Co-produced by several studios, it was written by Laurent Sarfati and Jérémie Périn (who also directed). Some of its tropes will be familiar, and that's deliberate; the director wanted to make an homage to the science-fiction that had inspired him.

You know how most SF is just the future with neat gadgets? One the aims of classic SF is to show how technology affects us, and Mars Express does that, though not too deeply. The premise of "If humanity had this kind of technology, how would it manifest in society?" is something I haven't seen explored like this in a long time, and that was really refreshing.

Most of the story takes place on a partially colonized Mars. The main character is Aline Ruby, an ex-military private investigator, working with her partner to look into the disappearance of two university students. There's AI (in both metal robots and organic interfaces), mind backups, implants, hacking, a mystery to unravel, action sequences - seriously, check it out!

U.S. distributor GKids has happily provided an English dub! (I can't comment on the voice acting, I watched a subtitled version.) It's available through Microsoft, Apple TV, and Amazon. IMDB rates it a 7.5 and Rotten Tomatoes 100/88.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading! I've been super-busy for the last three months, now trying to catch up on lots of delayed projects, both furry and non-furry. Keep spreading the joy of media you want to share!