Welcome back to Grown-Ass Man Dissects Children’s Media Theatre, with your host, T-Money. Yup, we’ve got another kids’ movie here, this time coming out of Iceland. Fret not, kids, it’s in English (and seems to have been filmed as such originally, unlike the usual spate of European animated features we usually get, poorly dubbed into English down the road). And it involves plovers.
Ploey tells the story of a plucky young plover chick (if that’s even the right term to use here), though his name may remain a mystery for now (wink). He’s born while his family is summering in Iceland, and when everyone gets set to migrate for the winter, he’s left behind. Y’see, he was only just learning how to fly, and his father became the victim of a vicious raptor, delaying his studies with an understandable bit of depression. Once abandoned, though, he sets off to find Paradise Valley, a place of warmth and abundance in the otherwise harsh winterscape around him. Along the way, he meets and befriends a world-weary ptarmigan, an Italian mouse family, a Russian swan, a Jamaican sheep, and a French mink, among other critters, all while trying to evade the aforementioned raptor and the cold weather. I have no idea why these animals represent such an agglomeration of accents, but if the film doesn’t care, neither do I.
So, yeah, it’s a similar story to The Land Before Time and its imitators, just with none of the emotional heft or full-blown skill Don Bluth brought to that production. The acting is uneven throughout, ranging from pretty decent to choppily overwrought. The script is not only unimaginative and lacks any creativity, but the pacing is glacially relaxed, with scenes seeming to last forever and plot points just kind of happening in a very lackadaisical suddenness (if that makes any sense). This results in a harshly poor sense of timing for the humor, which never, ever lands (though it comes close once, courtesy of the ptarmigan). Indeed, a group of recurring town-based, Furby-lookin’ birds tries real hard to be funny, but winds up gratingly annoying. The animation also suffers from heavy unevenness, wavering from fluid movement and lovely textures to strangely squishy solids and choppy designs. MOst striking are the birds’ eyes, which are huge, shiny, and luminescent, simultaneously charming and creeping me out. A maniacal fox gets the worst of it, coming through slightly out-of-focus and thus looking like a model from Fantastic Mr. Fox got over-inflated with air and wandered into a different film. On the positive side, though, the score, though nothing necessarily outstanding, is well done, providing an ever-appropriate backdrop for the action on screen.
What really got my brain working, though, is the choice to focus on plovers. I mean, I knew the bird existed before this, but only barely and nothing much beyond the name. So why plovers? Well, after doing some quick digging, it turns out that golden plovers are celebrated in Iceland whilst they summer there, and local folklore holds that the first plover sighting marks the beginning of spring. Who’da thunk? Moreover, it turns out plovers were responsible for the creation of the Guinness Book of World Records: The Guinness brewery’s managing director missed a shot at a golden plover while out hunting in Wexford in the early 50s. This miss sparked an argument about the fastest European game bird (the contenders being our plover and the red grouse (turns out, it’s the plover!)), which wound up being unable to be adequately referenced. Thinking that other arguments like this surely happen all the time, our man set out to craft a book chronicling various superlatives. Go figure, right?
But we were talking about a movie, right? I s’pose so.
This thing isn’t much to write home about. It’s not a bad story, really, just one that’s told in a sub-par manner. It’s better than a lot of the European stuff we normally get Stateside, but it’s nothing to actively seek out, unless, of course, your kid’s got a thing for plovers.
Allusions of Grandeur 