(Kids)
Readers of Terry Pratchett will probably be all over this animated adaptation of his Discworld children's novel, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. For fellow neophytes, let me fill you in. Maurice is a talking cat and he runs a scam akin to the Pied Piper's gig of ridding towns of rats. The rats are also intelligent, but aren't fully aware of Maurice's intentions - basically greed, it seems. They're under the impression that he's trying to help them find their Shangri-La, a magical island where animals and humans coexist in harmony. This chimeric wonderland is in a book that we're introduced to at the start of the film, narrated to us by Malicia, voiced by Emilia Clarke. The rats presumably found this book somewhere and revere it as their holy tome, but they're later sympathetically disabused of this notion of 'rat heaven' (perhaps a nod to Pratchett's own form of benign atheism?). Could it be that what they've been searching for all this time is actually right here (or there, in ye olde worlde fantasy Europe)?
Aside from this theme of hope fulfillment, there's also a strand of kicking against inequality - the evil Boss Man wants equal footing, or more, and his methods have a similarity to Magneto's, as opposed to Maurice's rats and their Professor Xavier stance. There's a moral quandary for Maurice and a sidebar relationship for Malicia with Maurice's faux piper, Keith. Not to mention Malicia's anxiety over becoming just a part of someone else's story. Lots going on in this.
The story is framed a little too cleverly, with Malicia narrating AND appearing in the story. There are mentions of framing devices and foreshadowing and many, many breakages of fourth walls. The whole film threatens to come off the rails with all this meta-structuring but it just manages to save itself, mainly thanks to oodles of weirdness. There's a homicidal 'real' Pied Piper, a pit fight sequence that sparks the film into life, and a late appearance of the Grim Reaper and his associate bone rat, the Grim Squeaker.
Hugh Laurie as Maurice, David Tennant as the wisest rat, Dangerous Beans, Gemma Arterton as Peaches, and David Thewlis as Boss Man are all great fun, but Emilia Clarke's Malicia reaches peak irritation pretty quickly (this is more down to the writing and direction than her performance, though). The writer Terry Rossio has some pretty underwhelming credits to his name (Shrek, The Lone Ranger, many Pirates of the Caribbean films, etc.) and the co-directors, Toby Genkel and Florian Westermann are experienced but neither are household names. Nevertheless, they've done enough to keep two kids engaged and two adults reasonably amused (small sample size, I know).
The Amazing Maurice is playing in many cinemas now, though I'd reckon it'll be done by end of school hols.
See also:
The Rescuers (1977), directed by John Lounsbery, Wolfgang Reitherman and Art Stevens, was a sweet, animated rodent-based film. We probably wouldn't have had David Thewlis as the main baddie in this, were it not for Mike Leigh's brilliant Naked (1993), so there's a long bow drawn.
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