By Sandra Hall
Magic Beach ★★★
(G) 76 minutes
Robert Connolly’s Magic Beach is a tender tribute to the childhood joys of the Australian seaside.
It’s for young children – a mixture of live-action and animation – but moves at a much gentler pace than the whizbang offerings that define the market for kids’ films these days. Connolly’s inspiration was the much-loved children’s book by Australian author and illustrator Alison Lester. They have been friends for years and he and his family have spent time with her at her house on the beach.
Inspired by the much-loved book, Magic Beach blends animation and live-action.Credit: Courtesy of Madman
Her illustrations bookend the film but Connolly has enlisted 10 animators to come up with their own ideas to accompany the individual verses that make up the text. The result is a collection of cartoon vignettes in wildly contrasting styles, punctuated by live-action sequences taking us into the day-to-day routines of a group of children who meet on the sand daily.
They swim and play together, building sandcastles, going boating and peering into rock pools, and in between, they find a quiet place to dip into the book. Their resulting daydreams spark the animations.
Emma Kelly’s opener is a lyrical piece about a boy riding a white horse under the waves in a sort of slow-mo dance evoking the rhythm of Lester’s verse. Simon Rippingale, Korean-Australian animator Susan Danta and Indigenous artist Jake Duczynski follow a similar course, taking one of the boys riding on a sea creature’s tail and lighting up the ocean and its corals and grasses with phosphorescence.
Robert Connolly’s Magic Beach is a tender tribute to the childhood joys of the Australian seaside.Credit: Courtesy of Madman
Others, like Anthony Lucas’ pirate tale, which uses miniatures, have a more rollicking tone. And Pierce Davison, who has worked on Adam Elliot’s animations, Memoir of a Snail and Mary and Max, moves furthest from Lester’s original by using models in the Elliot style and putting them together with clanking bits of robotic machinery.
In another radical move, there’s virtually no dialogue and not much plot. The only sequence that has even a hint of suspense is Marieka Walsh’s adventure story, which has a girl and her horse galloping out of a sand fortress to save her baby brother from a monster. The journey takes them through a forest of precariously balanced watermelon slices that threaten to trip them over at every step. It’s the most ingenious of them all.
Connolly is hoping that small children’s interest in observing others like themselves will outweigh the storyline’s lack of momentum.
I’m not sure. There is a lot of fun to be had from the animations but the holiday season is always so richly stocked with increasingly inventive animation blockbusters that it’s going to face stiff competition. Nonetheless, it is a visually beautiful film full of great ideas.
Magic Beach is in cinemas from today.
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