by Brendan Foley
Sometimes, it’s all in the execution.
April and the Extraordinary World (which is known by April and the Twisted World in its original French, which is actually a good deal more appropriate) has a lot of features and qualities that, on the surface, would make me roll my eyes so hard they’d pop out of their frigging sockets.
For starters, the film is heavily influenced by steampunk, one of the most tiresome and aggravating of art-styles out there. For seconds, the story is liberally cribbed from the likes of Sky Captain, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and every other ‘retro’ action-adventure film, with lots of talk about kidnapped scientists and hunts for secret masterminds and super weapons.
But April and the Extraordinary World is so damn well-executed even its familiarities and grating elements work wonderfully. It’s a delightful animated romp, as comfortable being silly as it is being witty, and powered by balls-out imagination.
Set in an alternate reality where Napoleon stayed in power and established a dynasty of French royalty, the Extraordinary/Twisted World of the title is a land razed of green, of nature, and of hope. Scientists (and promising scientific minds) have been continuously abducted for decades, meaning mankind’s technological development has stalled out at coal and steam. The air is toxic to breathe, all machinery is hyper-complicated, and entire cities move on rails and gears.
April is the daughter of a long line of scientists, all of whom have been desperately seeking the ‘Ultimate’ formula, a concoction that will erase illness and suffering. So far, all they’ve managed to do is give animals the ability to talk. Right as they are on the verge of a breakthrough, April’s family is abducted under bizarre circumstances, and she grows up angry, afraid, and alone, save for her talking cat buddy.
When April comes of age, she follows in her parents’ footsteps and pursues the ultimate formula, setting off a chain of events that sends her and an increasing number of companions on a bizarre journey across Paris, encountering a seemingly endless wellspring of spies, inventors, monsters, and mayhem.
At a brisk 90 minutes, Extraordinary World more or less begins and ends at a sprint. Those 90 minutes are loaded with double crosses and shifting allegiances, with what eventually seems to be a dozen different people all with different agendas dueling it out. The film never feels bogged down by all this craziness, moving briskly through a series of action and comedy sequences.
The shame of having to get through all that business is that April often feels secondary to her own movie. Having a super-brilliant female scientist be the lead of a sprawling, action-adventure shouldn’t feel like a special occasion, but it kind of is and as such, I wish April was given more to do besides hang back while people around her make moves and countermoves and blow up things.
Those explosions are lovingly rendered, as is the whole world of the extraordinary in Extraordinary World. It’s fucking gorgeous, from first frame to last, every frame a multi-layered masterwork of carefully crafted world-building. This alterna-Paris has been thought through to the last inch, and you could spend the entire film just studying the backgrounds and machinery that form the diseased, gorgeous universe of the film.
As the first movie I saw at my first Fantastic Fest, April was a lovely icebreaker. It’s the kind of oddity that will probably vanish soon after whatever limited release it gets, so getting the chance to experience its lovely, haunting world on the big screen with a game audience was a wonderful treat.