Carefully positioned to catch youngsters who’ve seen Moana but can’t get into Rogue One, this serviceable French-Canadian digimation cleaves to the post-Cowell definition of the word “journey”: its heroine is a redheaded dreamer (voiced by Elle Fanning) who flees her orphanage to blag a spot at the fin de siècle Paris Opera.
There’s some novelty in watching an animated character pursuing a creative career rather than, say, setting out on a quest with wisecracking animals, although the gendering appears altogether trad, post-Moana: while our gal pirouettes, her strutting male companion lands himself a gig in Gustave Eiffel’s workshop.
It’s attentively, attractively designed – with a real eye for the light hitting the buildings of a city under construction – but a shade more Black Swan in its DNA might have made the happy ending less inevitable and its pep less repetitive. The lyrics of its empowerment-pop soundtrack (“What’s wrong with being confident?”) swiftly become indistinguishable from the spoken dialogue.
