‘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.
