DiCamillo, Kate

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    ‘The Magician’s Elephant’ Review: The Promise of a Pachyderm

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    Adapted from Kate DiCamillo’s beloved children’s book, this animated adventure sands down the somberness of its source material while turning up the silliness.“Anything is possible,” the saucer-eyed characters insist in “The Magician’s Elephant,” a new animated adventure directed by Wendy Rogers. The movie adapts Kate DiCamillo’s 2009 book by the same name, which celebrates the power of serendipity: When a magician accidentally conjures a pachyderm in the war-ruined European city of Baltese, he sets off a chain of unexpected events that gives renewed hope to an orphan boy searching for his long-lost sister.The beauty of DiCamillo’s text is that it is equal parts somber and silly, its undercurrent of grief balanced by fantastical absurdities. In jazzing up the tale for the screen, Rogers sands down the somberness — Baltese is all fuzzy blues and pinks, with nary a trace of postwar grit — while turning up the silliness for gimmicky thrills.In this version, the orphan, Peter (Noah Jupe), has to perform a series of ludicrous tasks to win the elephant — who is crucial to his search — from a ditzy king (Aasif Mandvi). The characters’ motivations are so thinly defined (the king simply wants to be “entertained”) and the challenges so anticlimactic (in one set piece, Peter defeats a fearsome warrior by waving a book in his face) that the refrain “anything is possible” starts to feel as if it’s an excuse for sloppy plotting.The voice performances are lively and evocative — Benedict Wong as the magician and Brian Tyree Henry as a palace guard are standouts — but the film is stuffed with too many characters for even TikTok-fed young viewers to keep straight. And for a tale about the power of belief, the narrator, a fortune teller (Natasia Demetriou), breaks the fourth wall a few too many times, offering commentary like a parent lecturing in the middle of a bedtime story.The Magician’s ElephantRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Tiger Rising’ Review: A Cage of Clichés

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      A lonely boy finds an ally when he discovers a caged tiger in a forest behind his home, but imagination is somehow short-lived in this children’s movie.In the children’s drama “The Tiger Rising,” a lonely boy whose mother recently died finds a spiritual ally when he discovers a caged tiger in a forest behind his home in rural Florida.Rob (Christian Convery) is a shy 12-year-old whose skin disorder has made him a target for his classmates. They call him, in an example of the movie’s flavorless affectations, Disease Boy.Rob stumbles upon the tiger when he wanders the woods alone, but the quiet boy is an unlikely companion for such a wild creature. It’s only when he befriends a spirited new student named Sistine (Madalen Mills) that Rob’s imagination is given room to grow.Loneliness bonds the two outcasts, and together, they find an outlet for their frustrations by visiting the tiger. They want to set the animal free, even if it’s against the advice of the one adult Rob and Sistine trust, Willie May (Queen Latifah), a maid whom the children think of as a prophet.The director and screenwriter, Ray Giarratana, mixes elements of whimsy and childhood longing into “The Tiger Rising,” based on the book by Kate DiCamillo, with drawings that come to life and vivid dreams of tigers running wild. The fantasy sequences provide the film with momentary zings of energy. But imagination is short-lived, as the movie seems to wring every drop of sentiment from its scenes of lonesome dreamers.Here, children are angels who overcome demons, Black women are endowed with otherworldly wisdom, and tigers are symbols of spiritual emancipation. The metaphors are so obvious that the film becomes trapped in its own cage of archetypes and clichés, and unlike the tiger, there is no champion to open the gates to a more original cinematic world.The Tiger RisingRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More