Children's International Film Festival: The Prince's Voyage

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https://www.chiff.com.au/films/the-princes-voyage

07/11/2020 until 13/12/2020

Reviewed by Igor Vasilevitsky

In this day and age where kids films are heavily computer animated with hyper stimulated effects, thinly veiled cultural stereotypes, cheap laughs and questionable moral lessons, The Prince's Voyage, is a breath of fresh air.

With its spacious atmosphere, where its action-less vistas, art works in themselves, leave meditative space to immerse the viewers in a contemplative experience. The rudimentary animation, with its primal colour palette, appealed to some deeply instinctual part of my brain, which I felt could have been the animator's intention.

The plot is a modern day fairytale. It invokes a relatively simple classic story line of adventure, foreign lands, and magical elements, as well as the familiar characters: princes, children and their antagonists. Their wisdom and intelligence summons deeply archetypal themes within the viewer.

Looking around the theatre at various times, it became obvious to me that this film was perhaps too complex to appeal to children. However, there is no doubt that it appealed to the inner children within the adult viewers.

At its essence, the movie tackles such lofty ideas as the conflicts within our human nature and its reflections on our environment. There seems to be a pastiche of themes crossing social commentary borders into intra-psychic dynamics.

The central protagonist represents the instinctual, adventurous character within all of us as he encounters the antagonists; representing pure logic and ego. The latter attempts to confine, study and use the former for its own gain, and then makes an effort to destroy it for its' wildness and unpredictability. The arrogance of the self proclaimed; "Evolved" academics, and the "Civilised" is revealed through their fear of the primal, the natural, the raw, illustrating the disconnection that society has from our own inner and outer nature.

The child is present, representing our innocence, and its foreignness to 'civility', quickly finding a common language with the wild-man protagonist, as they set out on adventures.

The social commentary is readily apparent, where culture is demonstrated as consumerist, non-sensical and mechanized, built on the worship of fear itself, while nature is conveyed as life giving and organic.

I found myself wishing for a remote control, to pause and digest the content of some scenes, as close to every frame seemed to hold a treasure trove of deeper wisdom and philosophical allegory, and to marvel at and crave to hang on my wall, the near impressionistic; water coloured; visual splendours.

With the plethora of commercial cinema appealing to our shadowy senses, this film reminded me of the potency of the visual medium for profound and transformative story telling.