‘Nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it”: this is the blah-blah-bland message of this family movie, adapted from Kate DiCamillo’s popular kids’ novel. It’s heartfelt and sweetly earnest, but humdrum and disappointingly unmagical. The animation doesn’t help: characters speak with blank paralysed faces as if they’ve had botched Botox.
The setting is a war-weary town called Baltese where Peter (Noah Jupe) is a young orphan being raised in the school of hard knocks by a gruff retired soldier (Mandy Patinkin), who has him practising military drills day and night. But Peter is a dreamer not a fighter. One day he visits a fortune-teller who reveals that the sister he has always believed died as a baby, is alive. To find her, Peter must “follow the elephant”, says the fortune-teller. That same night a crap magician (his loneliness and disappointment beautifully voiced by Benedict Wong) accidentally conjures up an elephant in the town’s opera house; the beast comes crashing through the roof, squishing the legs of an old lady.
The nation’s king promises to give Peter the elephant if he successfully performs three impossible tasks. The king is a terrific character: gleaming-white veneered teeth and poufy hair, brilliantly played by Aasif Mandvi like a campy gameshow host, shallow and vain. Peter’s first task is to fight the king’s best soldier. Task number three makes this worth a watch: Peter must make a sad, grieving countess laugh (she hasn’t cracked a smile for years). The scene is very funny in an otherwise mostly joke-free movie. Though it does earn points for its portrayal of the elephant as an unknowable, untameable wild creature; she even gets her own dream sequence.
• The Magician’s Elephant is released on 17 March on Netflix.
