This girl’s own adventure would make the perfect entertainment for that niche, largely metropolitan market of parents who are keen on strong female role models and the kids who prefer Studio Ghibli movies to cartoons with Happy Meal merchandising.
Rémi Chayé’s directorial debut is set in the 1880s and follows feisty Russian aristocrat Sasha as she searches for her grandfather, an explorer who’s gone missing somewhere between Spitzbergen and Franz Josef Land. Armed only with plucky, navigational savvy and a pair of expensive earrings to barter, Sasha secures passage with a rough-necked crew of Nordic navvies.
The highly stylised design emphasises blocky, two-dimensional fields of colour with minimal use of lines, all the better to emphasise the whiteness and emptiness once the action gets above the Arctic Circle. It’s a proper animation buff’s piece of work, and admittedly a little slow to get its yarn ripping, but mesmerising and moving in the later stretches.
