This Ukrainian animated feature offers a bricolage of tropes from a wide range of children’s stories; mostly these derive from other movies but there’s a strong, proper folk-story spine in there too. Forest sprite protagonist Mavka (voiced in the English version by Laurie Hymes) is a fetchingly designed ingenue with green hair, disproportionally large doe eyes and magical healing skills, who lives in a part of the forest where humans no longer go, thanks to an old treaty between them and the forest spirits. But wealthy villainess Kalina wants to acquire an elixir from a magic tree in the forest that keeps her from ageing, so she sends a guileless young musician hunk named Lucas in to the forest to find it – and he promptly makes friends/falls in love with Mavka.
All this is very much in the tradition of Rapunzel by way of Disney’s Tangled, with a big dash of Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, while the animal sidekicks – such as cat-frog Swampy and a mobile tree spirit/talking log named Frol – are like fractionally cuter versions of the genetically engineered abominations from The Island of Doctor Moreau.
