Smart eight year olds might go a bundle on Scarygirl, an Australian animation visually targeted more at their parents, though its bounce, straightforward storytelling and bold (ok, simplistic) messaging says young.
There’s a touch of Finding Nemo in the plotting. Actually it’s more Finding Dory, the sequel, the one in which little Dory goes on a big long undersea quest to find her parents. Here it’s Arkie, a strange cross between an octopus and a human, with a patch over one eye and a mouth held together at the edges with stitches, setting off to find her dad, Blister, who’s been kidnapped by the despicable Dr Maybee.
Blister is a big yellow/green octopus who unaccountably wears a Beatle wig and has the power to revive dead things, a power that the crazed city-based scientist Dr Maybee wants to harness for his own ends.
By the end, as per, Arkie will have learned a few things about the strength to be found in family, however you constitute it, and will have become her own woman after a series of adventures that have introduced her to creatures great and small, not all of them friendly.
Among them are Bunniguru (a rabbit of sorts), Chihoohoo (a kind of dog) and Egg (an egg), who all work for Dr Maybee and spend their time trawling the planet for creatures with tentacles. Arkie, with one arm tentacular and the other ending in a hook (not sure what the rest of the arm is) qualifies at least once, whereas dad Blister qualifies eight times over.
Arkie’s chief weapon is her can-do spirit – “Nothing to it but to do it,” is her motto. And the weakness of Maybee, absolutely the villain of the piece, is his cynicism. So there’s a lesson right there.
One of the nice things about this buzzy and busy feature is that it doesn’t overdo the messaging. When it comes, it comes, but for the most part this is the questing adventure, a Lord of the Rings kind of thing, in animated form.
It’s very nicely done and isn’t in thrall to Pixar, which makes a change, instead drawing inspiration from the likes of The Boxtrolls (the make-do-and-mend), Spongebob Squarepants (the KFC surreal) and Song of the Sea (dreams and nightmare). A touch more of Spongebob’s sense of humour wouldn’t have gone amiss. I don’t think I was amused even once.
And the plotting, truth be told, is a touch mechanical. We more or less know how this is going to shake down from the outset and Scarygirl doesn’t do much to surprise us en route to its dénouement, which contains a reveal lifted from Star Wars.
Jillian Nguyen, who voices Arkie, is a real asset, and she isn’t cowed by working alongside names like Tim Minchin (Chihoohoo) and Sam Neil (Dr Maybee). The other non-famous voice talent – Anna Torv, Liv Hewson, Remy Hii, Rob Collins and co – follow Nguyen’s cue. Vocally this is a very democratic affair with the stars mucking in alongside the others.
In the end you even get to choose the political orientation of the meta message. Is the film about scientific elites out of control? Or is Dr Maybee more the representative of the unaccountable tech bro?
I thought it was, you know, fine – enjoyable and visually zippy with the joyously vivid animation the standout. Ack Kinmonth’s score protested a touch too much that what we were watching was exciting and packed with jeopardy, but the reality is that there wasn’t much of that.
In spite of the darkness here and there, cuteness is really what Scarygirl is selling, a nice story about a determined girl trying to find her dad and incidentally finding herself on the way. Cute!
Scarygirl – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
