1 Year 100 Reviews— Nocturna
I am not sure if it is a cultural thing or an experience thing, but I rarely find the animated films that come from Europe to be any good. The one exception is the divisive Irish film The Secret of Kells. I thought it was beautiful, imaginative, and wonderfully animated. It is a bit slow and I totally understand why some people do not like the movie, but I loved it.
However, that same studio’s follow-up film, Song of the Sea, I rather disliked. The list of European movies I dislike goes well beyond that. The Little Prince, A Cat in Paris, and the like I simply find to be mediocre animation and tediously boring. Often, they remind me more of a film-school student’s work rather than a professional, multi-studio, fully-funded animation projects. So, too, it is with Nocturna, the French-Spanish animated film that was recommended to me forever ago.
The premise itself is kind of cute and something I could see making a great short film. Nocturna is the name of the fantasy realm that comes to our world at night and causes all the phenomena that occur while we sleep. Morning dew, shining stars, creepy noises, what you dream, and even tangled hair are all the work of the citizens of Nocturna. The oddest worker of Nocturna (and one of our main characters) is the Cat Shepherd, an enormous humanoid who leads the world’s cats as they send children to sleep. In this movie, children fall asleep when they hear cats calling in the night (hence why cats are so noisy; they’re just doing their job!).
But, what kind of story do you make of this world? Why a coming-of-age story, of course! Basically, the whole movie is about a boy who unwittingly unleashes a catastrophe on Nocturna by being afraid of the dark. In so doing he ends up generating a fear/shadow monster that eats up the stars in the sky and the lights of the city. The only way to defeat the monster is for the boy to confront his fear of the dark.
If you are wondering how they make a plot like that into an 88-minute film, the answer is with a lot of padding. We spend half the film just watching the residents of Nocturna doing their jobs, rather than actually moving the plot forward. That is why I think this could have worked wonderfully as a short film: think like how Fantasia has the fairies change the seasons, but instead we watch a series of vignettes where Nocturna does its job. Instead, we get are messy, frustrating story that feels simultaneously slow and rushed.
Some of the reasons for these issues could be the language of the film. I am not sure, but I think the film was supposed to be animated in English. I am uncertain because, while the lip-syncing is much better in English than in Spanish, it does not seem to match up all that well in English either. What’s more, the pacing of the dialogue is often rushed and stilted. There were a few times where characters inadvertently interrupted each other in order to fit their line in. That is something you expect from a dub, but not from the original language. Nocturna is a French-Spanish joint venture, so maybe their grasp on English was not sufficient for a quality production.
Honestly, the worst thing about this movie is how terrible the pacing is in general. Poor lip-syncing and unexceptional animation can be forgiven if the movie feels good to watch; but, Nocturna doesn’t. The movie is constantly dragging and rushing and dragging and rushing along. It is like sitting in a car with a new driver who cannot control the gas or brake pedals and ends up slamming them both. By the end of the movie, I was so sick of it and so uninterested in anything that was going on that I was counting down the minutes until it was over. This movie may have given me narrative whiplash.
I feel bad ragging on small studios because they really are just doing the best they can. But, what else can you say? If you do not like a movie, you do not like it. If the movie has problems, it has problems.
Nocturna is not good. I wish it were, but it is not. Such an imaginative world and interesting ideas could have made something special if handled better. Maybe if it were written in its native tongue, or produced as something other than a feature-length children’s movie it could have become amazing. But, instead it is a sloppy mess whose name I will probably forget in a month. Do not bother with this one.
