Two sisters get transported to a new world and transformed into cats in this whimsical and thoughtful animated feature.
You can discover a lot about a fantasy world from its mode of entry: an English wardrobe, a disappearing train platform, a rabbit hole. The means to the phantasmagorical dream world of “Sirocco and the Kingdom of Winds,” available on demand, is as playful and fanciful as the destination: You have to hopscotch there.
“Sirocco” begins with two sisters, Juliette and Carmen, getting dropped off at a family friend’s house for the weekend. This friend, Agnès, is the author of a popular fantasy book series about an ill-tempered wizard named Sirocco who summons devastating winds to destroy whole towns. When Agnès is distracted, a sentient toy — a testy little fellow with magical powers and a treasure trove of absurd lines — hopscotches the sisters into the kingdom of winds, where they’re transformed into cats. That’s not the end of their problems: Carmen’s at risk of getting married against her will and Juliette is offered as a pet to Selma, an elegant avian adventurer turned opera singer. With the help of Selma, the two sisters set out to find Sirocco to figure out a way to get back home.
Directed by Benoît Chieux, who wrote the screenplay with Alain Gagnol, “Sirocco” feels drawn from the same extended family of stories as those from the great Hayao Miyazaki — contemporary fairy tales that skip genre clichés and conventions to provide novel plots where the next step in the journey is always a mystery.
The intrigues of this film begin with the animation, which recalls such psychedelic classics as “Yellow Submarine” and “Son of the White Mare.” A town of amphibious residents live in gravity-defying skyscrapers made by Jenga-stacked geometric blocks. Selma travels in a flying opera house kept afloat by a hot-air balloon resembling a jellyfish. And in the sky, clouds churn and move like sentient gobs of putty. The various landscapes of this fantastical world are also marked with expressive coloring-book palettes: The cherry reds and watermelon pinks of a town’s architecture and cliffs are starkly contrasted with the honey and amber browns of desert sands.
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Source: Movies - nytimes.com
