There’s too much going on here. While I find it somewhat fascinating that a story this simple can touch on so many different topics, that fascination turns into gawking rather quickly at how, by some bizarre anti-miracle, none of it ends up fitting together in a satisfying way.
Well, this was unexpected. A Danish animated family film that takes all manner of cues from Pixar (although, let’s be fair, just about every animated movie borrows somewhat from that studio, especially these days), and yet it being as derivative as it is is barely even an issue. Partly because the scavenged material at least makes sense as to why someone else would want to use it (unlike, say, the number of films I’ve covered of late who basically took the finale of Toy Story 3 wholesale), but partly because in the process of taking those ideas… this film manages to go even darker with them.
For all the good things I’m about to put down on paper about this film, I have to admit that I can easily see this film rubbing some people the wrong way. This is an incredibly cold and detached film by design, depicting the budding relationship between palaeontologist Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) and Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan), a young woman who was basically thrust into Mary’s care without much say from either party. The sterile colour palette (if it can even be described as having one from the offset), the dreary seaside setting, the distance held between the characters and the cinematic perspective; it can be a bit much to get into right away.
Oh goodie, Paul W. S. Anderson has found another video game franchise he can milk dry. Yeah, suffice it to say, I wasn’t really looking forward to this one largely because of his attachment to it (although, as I’ll get into, his isn’t the only name that spells trouble for this whole thing). Having sat through his last film with Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, easily one of the messiest and incoherent action films of the 2010s, if not ever, I went into this expecting the same level of aggrandising clutter. And yet, while that is certainly what I got out of this, this is the first film I’ve seen from Anderson in a long time where I find myself debating if this film is still entertaining in spite of his… eccentricities, let’s say.
For a franchise that has been kicking around for over a century, the only truly remarkable thing about Maya The Bee is… well, just how safe the creatives backing it get with these cinematic iterations. This is the third time I’ve found myself reviewing one of these things, and I find myself struggling to really say much of anything that I haven’t already gotten into in the past. Other than this being slightly better than what I’m used to seeing from this series.
You know you’ve seen too many bad talking animal movies when you start to cherish the ones that are merely passable. Nothing all that special, not all that particularly entertaining, but at least it isn’t a total trainwreck to sit through. That itself is quite surprising, coming from a film that the marketing is desperately trying to convince is on par with How To Train Your Dragon, made by a director whose only past credits are with sideways-glancing nature mockumentaries, and a writer who helped unleash The Queen’s Corgi on an unsuspecting public. And yet, all three of those preconceptions do add up to why this film turns out as purely average as it is.
Sometimes, a well-delivered idea means more than an original one. Coming across the same kinds of stories, told through the same kinds of perspectives, is bound to happen by sheer probability once you’ve sat through enough movies. And sure, seeing something that breaks away from the norm can be a good thing… but as I learnt last year with The Empty Man, raw ingenuity doesn’t always win against refined craftsmanship. And with this Aussie effort, we have a quite familiar story, but it’s told in such gripping fashion that the déjà vu fails to become an issue.
