Azur & Asmar

Directed by Michel Ocelot

This computer-animated European import is a frustrating succession of hits and misses, never completely pulling itself together and finally falling apart in its overblown conclusion. Its children’s book-style narrative involves blond-haired and blue-eyed Azur (French, we can assume), travelling across the deep sea (the Mediterranean, undoubtedly), to find the unceremoniously dismissed nanny of his youth, Jenane, her son Asmar, and the mystical djin of their childhood bedside stories.
Self-conscious moves to be fair and balanced in representations of intellectual Arabs, empowered women and noble panhandlers make Azur feel like a politically correct Indiana Jones. Chases through the desert, crowded marketplace antics and deadly obstacle courses confirm the Lucas-Spielberg source material. Certainly, other xenophobic, sexist precursors could be appended to Azur (a brief boating interlude quotes Titanic and a late crumbling bridge-jump recalls Lord of the Rings), but suffice to say this story is a revisionist quilting of things we’ve seen before.

Story conventions aside, seeing is certainly the operative sense in Azur. Characters are alternately blind, invisible, lost in fog or hidden in darkness, and the film’s ultimate message suggests looking beyond differences in appearance to prize inherent human similarities. While seeing works wonders for Azur’s characters though, it’s too often unpleasant for its viewers.

They don’t come much more un-cinematic than this hybrid of choppy videogame graphics (think The Sims meets Prince of Persia) and stunning storybook compositions. Most interior scenes are barren and sluggish, with unimaginative cinematography and ugly details that make Azur’s sweeping exterior tableaus seem all the more beautiful by comparison. Similarly, human characters come in tired and androgynous hourglass forms that seem unbearably conventional next to the mystical animals and stunning architecture that let Ocelot and his animators swing for the bleachers.

If the opening breastfeeding scene implies Azur will be an all-out expectation subverter, those promises never really pan out. Instead, the familiar learning-through-travelling trajectory is simply updated with PC details. In the end it’s admirable to be offering us something different from the usual irresponsible drivel, but Azur would have benefitted from more stylized animation, nuanced writing and a competent cinematographer’s insightful eye.

A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.