All birds, small as they are, have now returned.
ANIMATED FILM / CHILDREN’S FILM
«Richard the Stork and the Mysterious Jewel»
Norway / Germany / Belgium. 6 years. Director: Mette Tange, Benjamin Quabeck
NORWEGIAN VOICES: Oskar Fjeldstad-Bergheim, Haddy N’jie, Bjarte Hjelmeland, Amina Mohamud, Jonas Hoff Oftebro, Anette Hoff, Nils Ole Oftebro, Paul Ottar Haga
Richard (Oskar Fjeldstad-Bergheim), the sparrow who grew up among storks, has migrated to Africa with stork mother (Anette Hoff), stork father (Nils Ole Oftebro) and stork brother Max (Jonas Hoff Oftebro) to escape the winter. (Sensible birds).
Now they are soon going north again, and Richard is very interested in becoming the flock’s migration apprentice. As a sparrow, he is the little brother in more ways than one (much less so than all the others), and he overcompensates in terms of being ambitious. Much more ambitious than Max. He just wants to a cell.
Then it will still be Max who gets the position. Richard becomes angry and self-righteous. “I don’t need a flock!”, he snorts to himself, unaware that Per Fuggeli (!) has explained to us that – yes, we all do, actually. He runs away. Now they can have so much fun!
The adventure he embarks on turns out to be a little scary. But he is in any case accompanied by his old friends Kiki (Bjarte Hjelmeland), the budgie who loves dancing, disco and bling, as well as the possibly slightly schizophrenic pygmy owl Olga (Haddy N’jie, with an unrecognizable rabagast voice).
He will also make new friends, above all Samia (Amina Mohamud). She is the leader of a group of sparrows who live under the yoke of the self-indulgent Zamanos (Paul Ottar Haga). The peacock Zamano is looking for the mysterious, possibly mythical jewel of the title. He believes it is Samina’s task to locate it for him. The little sparrows are in practice prisoners.
The first film about Richard Stork, which came out in 2017, was a delightfully good animated film for the very little ones: Those who are too young to get so much out of Pixar and the slightly more adult Disney films. It was partly Norwegian. So is this one. And “Richard the Stork and the Mysterious Jewel” is, I would say, almost as good as its predecessor.
The animation is admittedly a bit stiff, not quite at the level of the most elaborate cartoons from the even bigger foreign countries. The “Storken” people are good at facial expressions and colors, but don’t have the budget to animate everything that happens in the picture, all the time.
In practice, it does not mean anything more serious than that we do not see the wind in the vegetation in the background, and that the waters the birds fly over do not have ripples on the surface. Hardly something the children in the target group will be bothered by.
They can also object that the narrative we are served is a somewhat more generic adventure than the surprising moving story we got in 2017. But no big objection, that too. Not all the time the way it is told is still so excessive.
Again, there is reason to praise the use of language in the film. The dialogue script does not talk down to anyone, and plays with alliteration and puns, without it becoming too chatty. “Richard the Stork and the Mysterious Jewel” is experienced as a couple of notches more screwed up than the first film. But it’s not as raucous as the weaker American animated films often become, and isn’t as exhaustingly obsessed with pop culture and advertising references.
There is reason to hand out a series of pats on the shoulders to the Norwegians who performs the dialogue too. They are, like last time, exuberantly well laid out.
