Orphan Felicie lives for dancing, which doesn't always ender her to the nuns who run the orphanage. She runs away to Paris and manages to join the Paris Opera Ballet, making an enemy of Camille and, especially, Camille's mother. With the lead role in The Nutcracker at stake, Felicie has to pick her steps very carefully.
This French-Canadian CGI feature proceeds exactly as you would expect it to, with Felicie meeting jeopardy at every turn yet, somehow, overcoming all obstacles through her own endeavours and with the help of friends. At no point was there a single moment where I thought "Well, I wasn't expecting that."
But this is not a fair criticism. As a solo male cinemagoer of mature years, I have sat among audiences where I did not belong - raunchy middle-aged matrons in Magic Mike, knicker-wetting teenage girls in Twilight - but I have seldom felt more out of place than among a cinema full of pree-teen little girls from ballet schools. Yet they are the audience at whom this film is aimed.
And, on that basis, it is very good. Voiced in the English language version by Elle Fanning, Felicie is a nicely realised audience-identification figure: likeable, a little bit naughty at times, bags of pluck and application, she is so well presented that I identified with her, and I am as far outside the target demographic as it is possible to be!
The dancing is also nicely done and takes advantage of being animation in order to push it beyond reality, not to the extent that it becomes outlandishly realistic, but enough to give it a "Wow!" factor.
Camille's mother is a psychopathic attempted murderer, but we'll gloss over that, shall we?
This is a very effective - and enjoyable - movie for little ballet-dancing girls, and I enjoyed it quite a bit myself. I'm not sure what that says about me, though....
This French-Canadian CGI feature proceeds exactly as you would expect it to, with Felicie meeting jeopardy at every turn yet, somehow, overcoming all obstacles through her own endeavours and with the help of friends. At no point was there a single moment where I thought "Well, I wasn't expecting that."
But this is not a fair criticism. As a solo male cinemagoer of mature years, I have sat among audiences where I did not belong - raunchy middle-aged matrons in Magic Mike, knicker-wetting teenage girls in Twilight - but I have seldom felt more out of place than among a cinema full of pree-teen little girls from ballet schools. Yet they are the audience at whom this film is aimed.
And, on that basis, it is very good. Voiced in the English language version by Elle Fanning, Felicie is a nicely realised audience-identification figure: likeable, a little bit naughty at times, bags of pluck and application, she is so well presented that I identified with her, and I am as far outside the target demographic as it is possible to be!
The dancing is also nicely done and takes advantage of being animation in order to push it beyond reality, not to the extent that it becomes outlandishly realistic, but enough to give it a "Wow!" factor.
Camille's mother is a psychopathic attempted murderer, but we'll gloss over that, shall we?
This is a very effective - and enjoyable - movie for little ballet-dancing girls, and I enjoyed it quite a bit myself. I'm not sure what that says about me, though....