Movie reviews: 'Minuscule', 'Little Emma', 'Four Souls of Coyote'

Three reviews today, starting with the trailers for:

The first two can be skipped, and the third is a maybe.

Minuscule (2013)

Minuscule: Valley of the Lost Ants is an 88-minute French computer-animated production from 2013, written and directed by Hélène Giraud and Thomas Szabo. I wasn't aware of it until a couple of weeks ago. I was reading online discussions about Flow (2024), and people mentioned there had been an earlier animal film without any dialog, so I decided to check it out.

Apparently Minuscule started out as a series of over 100 television shorts from 2006-2012, each 5 or 6 minutes in length. It's a family-friendly movie that takes place in a mountainous countryside, featuring insects and occasionally other animals. A young ladybug gets injured and befriends a group of black ants, who've found a box of sugar cubes from an abandoned human picnic.

Bringing the box to their anthill, they run afoul of an aggressive colony of red ants, leading to war, in which the black ants use human artifacts they've stockpiled. If that plot description sounds grim, it's not; there's no "war is bad" message, it's framed as a cute, comedic adventure. With no dialog!

Miniscule has a distinct story, but it's sooo slow. I started speeding up the video and then manually skipping forward. The visuals look very realistic, and the bugs communicate in their own way. Still, there's not a lot of characterization, it's more contemplative standing around with big googly eyes. It's thoroughly ok, but I don't know if I would recommend it due to the pacing.

Flow, in comparison, doesn't have a clear story and feels more dream-like. The director has outright admitted to only writing a script in order to secure funding, then abandoning it. In abstract art, the line between "I was doing whatever" and "You bring your own meaning to it" is blurry. Still, Flow has better pacing and more characterization than Minuscule, and I think its visuals and music are better too. They're really for different audiences.

Little Emma (2024)

Also known as Emma's Big Adventure is an 80-minute Chinese 3D animated production, a babysitting film directed by Leo Liao. There are some great Chinese films out there, but a lot of their kid's films just... I don't know, there's something unrealistically farcical and weird with the way people talk and the flow of events.

Emma is a little human (called a "tiny") in an animal world who was found washed ashore and raised by a kind llama couple. When the town bully ruins her birthday, she wants to find more of her own species. Unfortunately her uniqueness makes her a target for people who collect biological specimens.

After a series of convenient mishaps, she's on her way with Newton (a turtle child gadgeteer genius), Edward Wolf (an amateur scientist who is not a wolf), and his weasel sidekick Sancho. The story and dialog is just... stupid. Actress Natalie Grace (playing Emma) does the best with what she's given.

The film looks ok visually, but there are obvious signs of cutting corners. Despite taking place in an animal world, you don't get to see many outside of the main characters. Emma's hair is wound up in curlers so the animators don't have to animate it. And chunks of the story are lazily delivered with sketched drawings and narration. Emma even remarks about it. "This little montage makes it look easy, doesn't it? Montages sure have a way of doing that!" Yes, and not in a good way.

At least there aren't any poop jokes, but don't watch Little Emma. It's definitely not awful, it's just disappointing.

Four Souls of Coyote (2023)

This is a 105-minute Hungarian 2D animated film directed by Aron Gauder, who co-wrote it with Geza Beremenyi. Four Souls is a re-interpretation of North American indigenous creation myths, based around the trickster spirit of Coyote. The director had previously made two animated shorts featuring Coyote in 2015 and 2016.

The film starts in modern times, where an indigenous group is protesting the construction of an environment-destroying pipeline. When night falls, an old man in the group tells them stories about the creation of the world and of Coyote, which takes up most of the film.

The Creator God makes the land and the animals, then has a bad dream in which he also creates Coyote (or it's sent into his dream by the Great Spirit). Coyote is an absolutely jerk-ass creature who either directly or indirectly causes all the ills in the story. The paradise is gradually changed into a world with killing, eating, and the cycle of life.

There aren't really any positive things you can say about Coyote. He's drawn in a slightly more abstract style than everyone else, with a kind of cube-shaped muzzle. The animals in the world are all drawn very well (except maybe the raccoons), and I wish they had more screen time! Coyote and his human beings are the main focus.

The most difficult question is whether this film is "true" or "respectful" to indigenous stories and traditions. I'm not indigenous, so I don't think it's my place to say. From an outsider's perspective, it feels like the director honestly researched actual North American myths about creation and Coyote, picked different ones out, then strung them together and adapted them into this film. An indigenous anthropological consultant is mentioned in the film's credits.

Indigenous musicians also contributed to part of the film's soundtrack. However, especially towards the end of the film, there are several obvious departures from traditional myth, with an imposed modern spin. And then there was the appearance of the four-color Medicine Wheel.

At first I thought, "Cool," until I started doing my research, and found out it's a fake symbol that was cobbled together in 1972 by a German guy pretending to be Cheyenne. So now my thought is "Why the hell did you include this in the film?!" If the director was trying to be respectful of his source material, I feel this was a distinctly terrible choice.

Overall, it's still well-animated, and it feels like it captures the spirit if not the word of some of North America's creation myths. I just wouldn't treat it as authentic. Whether you enjoy it as a film or not, I think depends how much you can tolerate Coyote's personality. I found him extremely off-putting, but remained curious to see where the film went with him. For the squeamish, there are scenes involving blood, bodily organs, and human childbirth. It's availble on Amazon Video. Imdb rates it a 7.1.