Entertainment

Tale Owns The ‘Night’

The latest from French animation master Michel Ocelot is a film composed of six different tales. The framing story concerns an aging filmmaker who brings a boy and a girl to his studio where, in one night, they create six stories from different eras and different parts of the world, and act them out in the empty studio.

Ocelot uses a distinctive style, in which characters are played as black silhouettes against brilliantly colored backgrounds that can be abstract or more representational.

The stories may seem familiar — a werewolf loved by a beautiful maiden, a youth in an African village who wants a magic drum, another youth in the Caribbean who accidentally strays into the underworld and must pass the tests of the cruel ruler. But the plots are entirely from the filmmaker’s inventive imagination.

More likely to play well with older children, due to its split-up story line, Ocelot’s creation is like nothing else they are likely to see animating the multiplex.