5/10
Very beautiful, but flawed from a literary perspective
6 January 2008
This film shows very beautiful and very diverse pictures of animals, landscapes and weather. It is also worth viewing as a touching story of the personal development of a young girl, emotionally maturing during her friendship with the fox. Young children will also enjoy the film as a - though somewhat conventional - adventure story.

Unfortunately, even though many emotions are beautifully depicted using fine literary and cinematographic means, the film has an annoying tendency to also work with very old-fashioned, heavy-handed narrative techniques. In particular, the girl's emotions as well as the lessons she learns from her adventures are often rehashed in explicit comments from an intrusive narrative voice, in fact her own voice as she remembers her adventures a decade later. This gets particularly irritating in those cases where those comments are given repeatedly. Usually, the intrusive narrator just restates emotions that are obvious anyway, but in a few cases, her comments are even required to fully understand details of the plot.

Besides, the plot contains a few gaps that seem hard to fill in; you might perhaps call some of them inconsistencies, harming the overall credibility of the film. So, you will need to take it with a grain of salt, and definitely with a larger dose of passion than of reason and logic...

All the same, viewing the film together with your six to eleven year old children will probably be a rewarding experience, providing lots of subject matters to be discussed afterwards.
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