Originally made in Denmark in 2017, this animated feature (80 mins) is a mix of the absolutely delightful and the absolutely terrible.
First of all it is primarily a cartoon for children.. something the whole family can watch without any concerns; and in the main that is true. However, on the odd occasion something jars and makes you think. For a start, the protagonist in the story is, I think, intended to be 10 years old; and yet her mother actively encourages her to have a boyfriend (are Danish people really so blase about this?). Allied to this is the mother wanting to dress her daughter in a mini-skirt, cropped top and to wear make-up. Again, this seems rather too adult for a young girl.
However, lets look at the story. A fatherless family of four (mother, two daughters and a toddler boy) arrive in the city (assume Copenhagen) to start a new life there. No explanation as to why, what they were moving away from and why they needed a new start. And nothing about why they were a parent short either. Agatha Chrisitne, the younger daughter, is a would-be detective - hence her pun-full name, and is rather clumsy and heavy-handed in real-life, but her black and white dreams make her out to be the winning super-sleuth she'd like to be. However at this point, perhaps someone really ought to tell their children watching this film who the "real" Agatha Christie is, otherwise her sleuthing and insistence on wearing an old lady's coat and hat simply don't make sense.
She meets a young skater-boy who lives across the road (not next door as the title might suggest!) and she is convinced that he is stealing from the local mini-market. And so starts her first case, her big adventure and a pre-pubescant blossoming romance with this younsgter called Vincent.
All of this would be fine, and the story actually isn't that bad. It's not Bafta-winning dialogue by any means, and perhaps it works and sounds better in the original Danish, as the voice actors used to speak the English version do sound rather wooden sadly. However, there is a very large elephant in the room with this script. Except the elephant in this case is a large komodo dragon that talks! Where did Agatha find the egg? How did it grow and grow so large so quickly? and how / why does it talk? It isn't part of the plot, it isn't even a part of the subplot. It just sits there menacingly in the story for no apparent reason other than to do a bit of B-movie scary stuff.... very odd and for me completely ruins the film.
And as for the mum's non-existent parenting skills? - and to make it worse, she's a policewoman!
What I did like very much though was the animation itself. Youngsters today are spoilt by perfect CGI and computer-perfect animations which somehow take the magic out of seeing real drawings by real people unfold frame by frame like in the old days. The animation here is very retro, and reminded very much of my childhood in the 1970s watching the then top-of-the-range cartoons like Scooby Doo or The Whacky Races. The background music throughout works well and compliments the style of animation and the action nicely.
The story is something I think that girls might like more than boys, and is a pleasant diversion for a COVID lockdown afternoon when the mother has run out of ideas to motivate her youngsters, and the cartoon does have some positive themes / messages embedded in the narrative such as friendship, trust, lies, and shoplifting.
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 19/8/20
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