Stuffed with gags and one of the scariest villains in recent animated memory, The Amazing Maurice is a suitably smart and strange Terry Pratchett adaptation. JacobOller's Sundance2023 review:
-like self-aware fairy tale. Stuffed with motormouths and throwaway gags, the chunky animation can be a little off-putting, but its momentary ugliness feeds into its delightfully dark villains, its underdog heroes and the strange story tying them all together. This isn’t pristine, groundbreaking, photoreal CG, but cartoonishness that suits its oddballs—and might even give a kid a stray nightmare or two.
Turning the Pied Piper story on its head, and then flipping it around again so that it’s right-side up but utterly disoriented,asks plenty of its young audience. They’d better be able to keep up with Malicia’s rapid sledgehammer blows smashing through the fourth wall, because the narrator finds herself wrapped up in her own story; they’d also better be able to parse the nested myths explaining how some of the tale’s animals came to grasp such intelligence.
Perhaps it’s because the lore, and the narrative skirting around its edges, is so silly. The talking tabby Maurice and his clan of equally magic rats don’t show up with a particularly trenchant goal in mind. They arrive as scammers, working with recorder virtuoso Keith to scare townsfolk with a pest problem, then just as quickly rid them of it—for a generous donation, of course.
These elements, like the seeking of various MacGuffins or the inevitable romantic attraction between the human leads, is savvy enough to check all the tired screenplay boxes without wearing out the adults who’ll recognize them. More thoughtful kids will use the irreverence with which they’re treated to question the standard architecture of their fables. Others will simply be freaked out by the inventive and very scary villains.
It’s with this character’s design and the havoc he wreaks—leading to a run-in with Death and his corresponding rodent co-worker, the Bone Rat—that’s character designs find their groove. The cutesy rats, the Dreamworks-proportioned humans, the big and too-toothy cat—they’re not exactly innately charming creations. But they all have a bit of an edge, which is fully unleashed in Thewlis’ antagonist.
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