The Franco-Belgian animated hit returns from the film festival in an English-language version that possibly plays better than the original, thanks to excellent voicing by a top-flight cast.
Based on the children's books by Belgian writer and illustrator Gabrielle Vincent, published in the latter years of last century, the film tells the story of the boundary-stretching partnership between the bear and the mouse of the title. Theirs is an improbable alliance not just because of species difference but because the bears who live above ground and the mice who live below ground revile each other and are forbidden to fraternise.
The mouse world has a preoccupation with dentistry, which may seem weird, even borderline-Freudian, until we learn that the French equivalent of a tooth fairy is a mouse. Celestine is sent into the bear world on the lookout for cubs' lost teeth, where things go badly wrong. She befriends the lonely hangdog Ernest, a would-be one-bear band.
In an era when Disney and Pixar's state-of-the-art digital effects have remade the animation landscape, it is heart-warming to see old-school hand-drawn work and the sense of wistful nostalgia is underlined by the fact that Celestine is a keen cartoonist. There's a decent subtext, too, about tolerance for difference and sticking up for one's mates, though parents should be warned: if your kids can't giggle with delight at the idea of being eaten by a bear, they may be too young for this. Recommended.
