There’s rather a lot occurring beneath the shiny, enjoyable floor of this animated comedy, although among the questions it offers with — animal mortality, the world’s fragile eco-system — is likely to be an excessive amount of for youthful kids to course of. For older, smarter youngsters, it could possibly be a gateway movie, a solution to flip younger cinephiles onto Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 masterpiece A Matter of Life and Death, with which it shares a bit DNA. It additionally, just like the brace of Chicken Run motion pictures, raises the topic of nature conservation in a means they are going to reply to, because of Bill Nighy’s deliciously machiavellian uber-villain and his killer horde of robotic bees.
The star of the present is a stray cat performed by British comic Mo Gilligan, who additionally narrates the movie with a Goodfellas-style voiceover. When we meet him, he’s on the finish of his lives, having been deserted by his house owners, who’ve offered up and moved away. By probability, he crosses paths with Rose (Simone Ashley), a scatty however sensible pure science graduate whose particular curiosity is the well-being of bees. Rose takes pity on the cat, naming him Beckett (after the outdated English phrase for beehive), and fattens him up with a gentle eating regimen of treats.
Beckett’s life is gravy, till Rose’s ex-boyfriend Larry (Dylan Llewellyn) turns up. Larry shambles onto the scene in a beat-up camper van, dressed like a shaggy surfer bro with Crazy Color hair. He is, says Rose, “a nitwit”, however seeing as he’s additionally “a genius with bees”, she wants him to assist her with thesis, which is eagerly anticipated by her tutor, Professor Craven (Nighy). Beckett does his finest to eliminate Larry, who’s allergic to animal hair, however when sitting on his pizza fails to do the trick, Beckett tries to sabotage Larry’s van, shedding his final life within the course of.
Beckett doesn’t fairly make it to heaven, although. In the ready room — a nod to Beetlejuice, maybe, if rather a lot much less gothic — Beckett is given a second probability, or quite an extra 9. He fails, nevertheless, to learn the small print: every time he loses a life, he’ll come again as a unique animal, a call-back to the movie’s cryptic cold-open, during which a horse frantically stampedes its means in the direction of Rose’s cottage.
As Beckett begins to grapple together with his actuality, returning variously as a parrot, a cockroach and a fish, he cottons on to the truth that Professor Craven isn’t the philanthropist Rose thinks he’s. Traumatized by a childhood sting, which resulted in public humiliation and an undignified bottom-related nickname, Craven is planning to let the world’s bee inhabitants die, so he can change them together with his AI equivalents. Helping him to drag this off are two goons, Kirk and Cameron, each voiced by One Direction’s Zayn Malik.
Malik and Nighy are the most important names right here, however 10 Lives doesn’t actually need the star wattage that clutters up most big-studio animations. Using the Dorset coast as his backdrop, director Christopher Jenkins creates a beautiful homespun world that’s fairly refreshing after the current development for fairytale kingdoms in faraway locations. The craft is top-notch and fairly magical, notably in a scene during which Beckett, now a rat, climbs a bulging drainpipe, however there’s additionally an unassuming, genteel Britishness that may attraction to folks — nicely, extra seemingly grandparents — introduced up on Halas and Batchelor, Camberwick Green and The Herbs.
With such a selected premise, there’s just one means 10 Lives can finish, and, after the dangerous guys are uncovered and routed, it does go there. However, there’s nothing particularly unhappy about it, since Jenkins pulls out a neat circle-of-life get-out clause that ought to stave off any nightmares. Adults must be conscious nevertheless, that it’d begin some awkward conversations with curious kids; after seeing this, telling them the household pet has gone off to stay on a farm gained’t reduce it any extra.
Title: Ten Lives
Section: Sundance (Family Matinee)
Sales agent: GFM Animation (International), WME (US)
Director: Christopher Jenkins
Screenwriters: Christopher Jenkins, Karen Wengrod, Ken Cinnamon
Cast: Mo Gilligan, Simone Ashley, Sophie Okonedo, Bill Nighy, Zayn Malik, Dylan Llewellyn, Jeremy Swift,
Running time: 1 hr 28 min
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