CAPSULE: April and the Extraordinary World (2015, Dirs. Christian Desmares, Franck Ekinci)

April and the Extraordinary World kicks off with an impressive retrofit explanation of steampunk: a failed experiment, two escaped talking lizards, the kidnapping of the world's most eminent scientists and the destruction of the earth's forests to power the steam engines that compensate for the absence of electricity.

It's a neat prologue but it soon gives way to a perfunctory adventure story involving the original scientist's granddaughter and her quest to finish the experimentation that cost her her family, with a talking cat in tow.

For all its striking animation (executed after a graphic novel by Jacques Tardi and beautifully evoking his bold style) and the excellent vocal performance from the likes of Marion Cotillard, Jean Rochefort and Marc-André Grondin, April and the Extraordinary World isn't all that involving. The episodic plotting races along with surprisingly little humour. In fact, the film only comes into its own in the impressive Jules Verne inflected final act, which packs in some long overdue conceptual punch.

I'm not sure if this one's going to delight the kids as much as it needs to, or if it has enough meat to pull in the older punters. April and the Extraordinary World is not a film that deserves to fall in the cracks in between, but I'm pretty certain it will.

★★★

Trailer: