This eye-catching, dimension-traveling adventure might be aimed at kids, but there’s plenty here for adults who grew up believing the possibilities of animation might be endless. Now that Disney has done its best to persuade us otherwise, Benoît Chieux’s fabulous Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Streams is here as a palate-cleanser, tucking away a tender story of love and loss in an insanely imaginative psychedelic brainstorm. If Matt Groening and Miyazaki took magic mushrooms and watched The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine together, they could conceivably come up with a movie to match this.
Chuck Jones’ 1970 classic (albeit for weird kids and stoners only) The Phantom Tollbooth is a suitable benchmark, only here it is a game of hopscotch that provides the conduit between this world and the Kingdom of Air Streams. Which is where the story begins, with the mighty wizard Sirocco summoning the elements to assuage his boredom. It soon turns out to be a false start, however; what we’re actually seeing is a story being written by renowned children’s author Agnès. Agnès has been pulling an all-nighter and forgets that she is due to mind her friend’s two little girls for the day.
Even animated French people have a large house with an extensive library, so Agnès urges Carmen and her little sister Juliette to read a book while she takes a nap. And so vivid are Agnès’s own books that, while literally flicking through one, Juliette finds a little wooden toy falls from its pages. The toy is flustered and immediate realizes that it is in the wrong dimension, using its chalk hands to draw a hopscotch grid on the floor before disappearing into the final square. The impetuous Juliette follows him, and Carmen chases after her, which is how both end up in the Kingdom of the Air Streams.
The mystic hopscotch, it seems, can trigger transformations, and so both sisters arrive at the other end in cute half-human cat form. However, this isn’t much noticed, since the Kingdom is a pretty inclusive place, ruled by a fat, ugly mayor who is besotted with the singer Selma, an imperious duck with the voice and grace of an enchanted Nina Simone. The mayor’s attempt to ingratiate himself with Selma are sullied when Juliette knocks over his welcoming sign; as punishment, the mayor decides that Juliette must work for Selma as a maid and sentences Carmen to marry his idiot son. In the meantime, the wooden toy has broken after attempting a hopscotch jailbreak — in shrunken form, it wobbles about speaking nonsense and is clearly unfit to get the girls home.
Selma sees right through the vulgar mayor — “It’s so unfair,” she sighs. “Audiences get to choose the artists they like, but artists cannot choose their audience” — and as soon as he leaves, Selma offers Juliette her freedom. To her astonishment, Juliette knows all about her, since Selma is a major character in Agnès’s work. Selma reveals that she is Agnès’s sister; after her untimely death in a storm, Agnès reimagined her as restless adventuress, keeping her memory alive in the fantasy of her fiction. Selma bonds with the young girl and offers to help Juliette prevent the imminent marriage of her big sister.
Like all good children’s adventure stories this quest is bracketed by the need to get home, and Chieux piles on a genuine sense of peril that’s genuinely edge-of-the-sea thrilling as opposed to scary (it’s hard to imagine young children being too traumatized when the mayor unleashes the candy-guzzling Goodie Gobblers). And so, as in Emerald City, all roads lead to the wizard, who alone has the power to return to the children safely to the human world. In finding him, though, Selma discovers a surprising truth about Sirocco, whose relationship with the wind creature — a monster from the id, rendered in suitably bonkers abstract form — is not what it might appear.
Needless to say, a happy end is there to be had, with the now-familiar twist to suggest it wasn’t all a dream, but for all those cute familiarities, Scirocco… is very much its own creature, unique and effortlessly surprising. Will there be a sequel? Well, the events within the film suggest Selma has led a very storied life, with many more such exploits behind her, which makes the idea of her returning for more female-fronted sagas a pretty enticing one. After all, adventure is like riding a bike, she says. You never forget.
Title: Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Streams
Festival: Annecy (Competition)
Director: Benoît Chieux
Screenwriters: Alain Gagnol, Benoît Chieux
Running time: 1 hr 16 min
Sales agent: Kinology