Kaspar Jancis, Estonian director known for his auteur short films and a regular at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, returns with the feature film Captain Morten and the Queen of Spiders, presented out of competition. Aimed at children, the film does not shine by its research or originality.
It's a boy's story
Young Morten Vik is a boy whose biggest dream is to become a sailor like his father. The latter, still absent, leaves him in boarding with Annabelle, the owner of the village café, an obnoxious and domineering woman totally obsessed with dance. By a combination of circumstances, Morten is reduced to the size of an insect. While the café where he lives is flooded, he finds himself on a makeshift boat populated by insects that look and reproduce the social hierarchy of those around him. Then begins a perilous adventure that pushes the young boy to reveal himself.
But something is missing
If the starting story is not necessarily of a crazy originality, it is not the problem with this film. The whole is predictable and we do not manage to get attached to the main character, or any other for that matter. For a film aimed at children, the whole thing lacks humor and fantasy. The society represented here, with its secondary characters without personality, weak and wanton, entirely subject to a despotic and absurd authority, is perhaps not the best example to give to youth. We are clearly in a pattern of initiatory plot of the hero.
The stop-motion realization is however quite correct.
Thus, Captain Morten and the Spider Queen is not the movie we will remember for years. Let's hope that the director will manage to infuse more wonder and make his heroes more endearing and a little prettier in his next works.
