Dilili in Paris (Michel Ocelot)

[Philip J. Fry]

https://i.imgur.com/HJL7oe1.jpg

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmBcSoz86vA

IMDb (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7169514/) / wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilili_in_Paris) / RT (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dilili_in_paris) / Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/dilili-in-paris)

Official website (https://www.wildbunch.biz/movie/dilili-in-paris/)

[Philip J. Fry]

Watched this last night.

I gave this movie a blind-watch, expecting something like April and the Extraordinary World and, I gotta confess it felt a little more slight than I expected; I guess the protagonist Dilili, a young Kanak girl just meeting Paris, was good enough as an anchor to make the movie watchable. She's precocious, but doesn't feel like a child turned into an adult to seem precocious and the courier guy was okay-ish?

Meanwhile, the bad guys are a little over the place. They are this shady association which do includes a couple members that have their level of creepiness (one combines the classic twirling-mustache archetype with this overtly aura of a child molester) and yet, for the most part, do not seem that threatening. And their endgame has this strange mix of misogyny and utter ridiculousness (since women at the time were gaining more independence and were no being seeing more as equals to men, they are kidnapping them and reeducating them to behave like furniture). It's kinda interesting seeing how Ocelot somehow makes this contradictions work.

Above all else, the movie feels like a love letter to late 19th/early 20th century Paris. It has tons of cameos of scientists and artists living in Belle Époque Paris, from Louis Pasteur, to Marie Curie, Pablo Picasso and Emma Calvé while visually it features some very detailed backgrounds (Ocelot took pictures of Paris for 4 years and incorporated them into the movie) which makes the city feel like a character of it's own. However, the character designs felt a little cheap and the movements kinda clunky.

Overall, I give the movie a somewhat reluctant yay. It is more of the kind of movie you'd show to a younger child that isn't insulting and stupid and it does have some shades of feminism and commentary about race that would be nice for a kid just beginning to shape up those concepts, but if you're an adult... just watch April and the Extraordinary World.