To have the new children’s laureate, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, adapt a book by former children’s laureate Michael Morpurgo into a feature-length animation is surely to embark on an unsinkable voyage towards kids’ movie greatness. Especially when the Morpurgo novel in question is Kensuke’s Kingdom, published in 1999 but harking back to the Swallows and Amazons heyday of summer hols adventure stories.
Our young hero, Michael, has been taken out of school by his, in my view, wildly irresponsible parents to go on a round-the-world sailing trip (the family seem to have evaded the attention of social services simply by being so solidly middle class). It’s exciting at first; the old-fashioned sense of derring-do further buoyed up by Stuart Hancock’s sweeping orchestral score. But then a storm hits and Michael and his dog, named Stella Artois – a red flag, surely? – are thrown overboard, later washing up on desert island.
Michael and Stella are saved from certain starvation by Kensuke, an elderly Japanese man who was shipwrecked on this same island long ago and has learned to live in harmony with his surroundings. Kensuke wordlessly teaches Michael about this natural world, aided by Lupus Films’s beautifully hand-drawn wildlife, which does much to convey a heartfelt environmentalist message. Eventually, Kensuke also opens up about his own wartime loss. An ink splodge is a memorable way to hint at the devastation of Nagasaki, without veering too close to the traumatising, anti-war truths of Studio Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies, or the panic-inducing plausibility of Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows.
This is all nobly intended, with impeccable credentials and expertly crafted, but the fear remains that without the cute anthropomorphised animals and silly snark that’s come to characterise the major studio animations, Kensuke’s Kingdom (directed by Neil Boyle and Kirk Hendry) will fall squarely into the category of “Films Parents Think Their Kids Ought to Enjoy”. Still, congratulations if you’ve raised the kind of historically aware culture vulture who really can appreciate allusions to traditional Japanese ink painting.
In UK and Irish cinemas
