Bombay dreams: "All We Imagine as Light"

One reason critics have responded to All We Imagine as Light as they have is surely that it does something relatively new with one of the most filmed cities in the world. Shaping an idea of Mumbai as a lived-in, workaday environment rather than a mere backdrop for all-singing, all-dancing spectacle, writer-director Payal Kapadia seeks out sidestreets and backlanes in place of studio lots; once in situ, she's gone searching for everyday interactions, and sought to centralise ordinary people instead of the usual Bollywood heroes. Many of these are migrants, drawn hereabouts by the prospect of paid labour; some of them have even made it to the commuter class, sketched in an early sequence that finds women nodding off on the evening metro train. Kapadia's heroines are both: a pair of Malayali nurses observed sharing a flat, while at different stages in their professional and personal lives. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is the more senior of the two, with fledgling sisters to train and a husband who's gone to work overseas and all but disappeared without trace. Anu (Divya Prabha) is the junior party, a keen texter, still learning the ropes, and involved in a giggly romance with a male contemporary. Although the women's day jobs have a life-and-death element, these two aren't trying to save the world so much as keep a roof over their heads, and maybe find happiness or at the very least some peace. Part of the novelty with All We Imagine as Light lies in seeing a contemporary Indian film where the heroines appear far more likely to gaze up at billboards than be enshrined upon them; you can well imagine Prabha and Anu encountering Deepika or Ananya's latest spot of cross-promotional branding and wondering how the hell anybody reaches such dizzy heights.

Given the extent of the praise lavished on Kapadia's film since its Cannes outing this summer - where it won glowing reviews and, at the last, the Grand Prix gong - you may arrive at AWIAL expecting it to knock you for six. Is it any less of an achievement that it instead quietly diverts, absorbs and involves us? This is partly an issue with festival discourse, where everything has to be talked up as if the very future of the cinema depends on it, but talking AWIAL up strikes me as less than helpful - perhaps even actively unhelpful - to the film's understated methods. There is, for starters, a subtle complexity to the way these women interact with one another, with the men in their lives, and especially with Mumbai itself, regarded here as a very masculine conception, alternating between plugged-in, switched-on attraction and cool indifference. (The girls have to get away from it at a crucial juncture to appreciate the lives they've made for themselves.) I'd venture Kapadia isn't doing vastly more than a lot of the Parallel and independent cinema that never travelled to Europe and thus never had a major festival spotlight shone upon it: she calmly, attentively observes, looking out for her characters in all senses of the term. Yet one appreciable difference is that AWIAL has been written and directed by a woman who - more so than Satyajit Ray, say - knows innately how women talk, act and interrelate at the end of a long and tiring working day. Another would be that this Indian-French co-production has been carefully curated to court Western eyes and tastes. If those critical first responders fell in love, it's in part because the movie was always intended as a mash note or meet-cute.

Inarguably, much of the detail here is Mumbai local and specific: the dishes the women prepare, the dialects spoken, the awkward couplings and ladies-only carriages, the cavernous rich/poor divide. What Kapadia has done is pull all this into the 21st century, to make an observational film that is as much Modi as Ray, born of what has been (for better and worse) a rapid social modernisation, and what we might call the Mubification of India, given the number of shots and sequences here that clearly relate to the texts its maker has studied and metabolised. Michael Mann-like tableaux of Mumbai by night crystallise one of the film's idiosyncrasies: a light blue palette that conveys coolness over the more familiar heat and humidity. (The rains fall on these girls.) The basic set-up even has something of certain American cable shows in its DNA: women adrift in a city that reminds them, time and again, of their own insignificance. You wouldn't have to be a Mumbai resident to know what that feels like. You don't necessarily have to be a woman to know what that feels like. At one point, you catch Kapadia actively pandering, when she films the nurses huddling in a cinema, illuminated by the screen: see, she whispers, they're really just like you. Yet AWIAL is at its most insinuating whenever it channels ambience and transience: travelling shots of migrant workers unloading their goods, the trains rattling along, a second-half outing to the coast, where the film begins to seem like a holiday special of its own, with caves that echo In the Mood for Love's Angkor Wat finale. We're all just passing through, in the end, sometimes borne on the waves, often treading water. Announcing herself as an ultra-empathetic eye and voice, Kapadia at least tries to preserve some record of these women, and she invites us similarly to consider their struggles and travails; quietly, in her film's singularly hushed fashion, the we of the title becomes properly universal and all-encompassing. Folks we recognise, yearning for better and for more, whether greater stability or permanency: sometimes the cinema can be as simple, and yet as rare and precious, a thing as this.

All We Imagine as Light is now playing in selected cinemas.

From the archive: "Daft Punk & Leiji Matsumoto's Interstella 5555"

A collaboration between French dance maestros Daft Punk and one of Japan's leading animators, Interstella 5555 sets the album "Discovery" to an anime reworking of the plot of the S Club film Seeing Double, with an evil impresario (who looks more Ken Russell than Simon Cowell) trying to take over the world using popstars, the latest weapon of mass destruction. The result looks like a couple of episodes of Battle of the Planets rescored by a Shoreditch club promoter. That stylophone guitar riff in the middle of "Aerodynamic" is one of the most thrilling moments in all recent pop music, and if nothing in Matsumoto's visuals quite matches it, the music benefits from being played at Dolby stereo level in a darkened room. (You'd take listening to this over Thomas Bangalter's other score this year, the sonic assault he engineered for Gaspar Noe's Irreversible.) A useful reminder of what a strong album "Discovery" is: even the tracks unreleased as singles have somehow managed to lodge in the subconscious.

(October 2003)

A 4K remaster of Interstella 5555 plays in selected cinemas this Thursday for one night only.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of November 29-December 1, 2024):

1 (new) Moana 2 (U) ***

2 (1) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

3 (2) Gladiator II (15) ***

4 (3) Paddington in Peru (PG)

5 (new) Conclave (12A) ****

6 (4) Red One (12A)

7 (new) All We Imagine as Light (15) ****

8 (5) Heretic (15) ****

9 (re) The Polar Express (U)

10 (7) Small Things Like These (12A) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. All We Imagine as Light

2. Conclave

3. Gremlins [above]

4. Grand Theft Hamlet

5. Moana 2

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (5) The Grinch (U)

2 (1) Gladiator (15) ****

3 (4) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

4 (2) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

5 (12) The Wizard of Oz (U) *****

6 (3) The Wild Robot (U) **

7 (8) Dune: Part Two (12) **

8 (7) Despicable Me 4 (U)

9 (13) Elf (PG) **

10 (27) It Ends with Us (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Speak No Evil

2. Kneecap

3. Evil Does Not Exist

4. Alien: Romulus

5. Didi

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Bonnie and Clyde (Sunday, BBC2, 10pm)

2. So Long, My Son (Saturday, BBC2, 11.15pm)

3. The Addams Family (Saturday, ITV1, 12 noon)

4. Petite Maman (Sunday, Channel 4, 1.35am)

5. Everything Everywhere All at Once (Saturday, Channel 4, 10.15pm)

Together in electric dreams: "Grand Theft Hamlet" and "The Remarkable Life of Ibelin"

If you're anything like me, you'll have spent the past few weeks wondering whether it might be best if we collectively power down the Internet over the next four years, the better to reset the world, hush the loudmouths, trolls and tech bros, and allow for some form of sanity to prevail anew. Yet two new documentaries offer a case for the defence of the life lived online, not least that it can arm creatives with a whole new set of storytelling tools. In January 2021, as the UK entered into its third lockdown, two out-of-work actors - faced with the abundant leisure time that followed from the shuttering of theatres - met up online for one of their regular games of Grand Theft Auto. After many hours of standard GTA business - including shooting a valet, stealing a car and being pursued at high speed by the police - the pair, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, arrived at a new mission between themselves: to stage a performance of Hamlet at a vast outdoor arena they'd stumbled across within the game, recruiting fellow gamers to fill the other roles. As directed by Crane with his partner Pinny Grylls, the film that resulted from this diversion, Grand Theft Hamlet, can legitimately lay claim to being a documentary unlike any other, in that everything we see on screen has been captured within the world of the game; its subjects are characters composed of often alarmingly jerky pixels who move in ways less predictable than either flesh-and-blood human beings or the avatars in Pixar movies. Everything we hear has been recorded through a headset, cueing the sort of WTF commentary you'd otherwise only happen across watching a young nephew playing Fortnite. All the world's a stage, all its men and women literally players, bashing away remorselessly at the A and B buttons, pausing between couplets to take generous slurps of energy drink.

For all its digitised novelty, GTH is actually telling an old, familiar story: that of the grassroots community theatre project, in which an unlikely ensemble of untested performers gather to put on a show in the face of unexpected obstacles and setbacks. (Consider it a pixellated Sing Sing.) Some of the syntax is exactly the same: establishing shots of Vice City offer pause for reflection, while also highlighting the game's scope and artistry. It's just that matters tend to get more chaotic whenever people enter the shot. Someone auditions in the guise of a hip-thrusting alien. A snotnosed 13-year-old player, oblivious to this project's lofty artistic aspirations, pulls out a shotgun and drops one of the directors. None of the avatars' mouths exactly matches what they're saying, which looks doubly odd when they're spouting the same iambic pentameter Gielgud and Olivier specialised in. Certain elements left me sceptical: arguments between the friends, and between husband and wife, look and sound like contrivances designed to trick up the jeopardy. (We are dealing with actors, after all.) Even at a mere 90 minutes, the film left me headachey: if the absence of fresh air and sunlight doesn't do for you, the relentless chatter and corkscrewing in-game camera movements will. There were, it transpires, good reasons our parents advised us to switch those screens off and go play outside; this is game-as-movie (or movie-as-game) in runthrough mode, its rough edges and tactical errors (a tumble off a tall building, an aborted getaway by plane) left in as both lesson and source of potential amusement. Still, there is something stirring in the bigger picture of folks fumbling their way towards Shakespearian truths in dark times, striving to enable something creative within a framework that more commonly favours destruction. And it's another useful record of the quiet mania of lockdown: folks doing mad shit in the virtual realm, because there was nothing else to do in the real world. Obvious sequel ideas present themselves. Call of Duty Coriolanus. Doom Titus Andronicus.

Benjamin Ree's The Remarkable Life of Ibelin goes deeper, and finds rich visual and emotional texture in the contrast between lived and virtual reality. Its backstory is set out using home video footage that represents drab, sorry actuality. There was once a boy called Mats Steen, born in the late 1980s in Norway to loving parents. Mats, we learn, was not long for this world, born as he was with Duchenne, one of those muscle-wasting syndromes that seem terribly arbitrary and unfair. As the home video ticks by year by year, we witness its effects: already a stumbler as a child, by early adolescence Mats was reliant upon a series of mobility devices that did all the heavy lifting while he grew only thinner and thinner. (One especially vivid shot: trousers flapping like circus tents around painfully tiny ankles.) This frail body finally gave out in 2014, when Mats was just 25, yet as his family was to discover, their boy lived on in the hearts and minds of his fellow gamers - and as Ree's film logs on, leaving the analogue world behind, it gains legs and heft and starts to take flight. Upon Mats' death, his father Robert found his inbox inundated with emails from those his son had encountered online while playing World of Warcraft, one of the few activities he could still take pleasure in as his body disappeared from under him. In this digital sphere, Mats assumed new form as the warrior enshrined in the title: a more robust, self-made figure who was all at once a seeker, a lover and a fighter, a leader of men, and a loyal friend, prone to initiating conversations with "how are you doing?", possibly as this was the question most asked of him offline. The story has an inbuilt poignancy even before Ree cuts back to footage of a stick-thin Mats, courtside in his chair at a tennis match, surrounded by fair-haired, full-bodied Nordic youth, apparently unable to get the girl, save the day or realise his potential in this context. Crucially, however, the film regards this kid not as a martyr or victim, nor especially as a latter-day saint, but a teenager making choices, some misguided or muddled, all recognisably human.

Ree, who did 2020's The Painter and the Thief, shapes up again here as one of modern non-fiction's most patient and diligent storytellers. That earlier film unfolded over several years; this latest makes the process of discovery central to World of Warcraft central to the film, and to the reconstruction of this reconstructed life. Ree turns up not just those home videos and emails, but hundreds of blogposts Mats wrote from his chair, a vast archive of data logging Ibelin's movements and conversations, and - most movingly of all - those fellow players Mats wooed, nurtured, stirred and inspired during his time in this world. These folks, most of whom are now in their twenties or thirties, have been encouraged to set aside any awkwardness and share a memory or two; the picture they collectively paint suggests Mats used the game not only to transcend his own physical limitations (running for miles, say, even before setting out on the prescribed quests) but also international borders, the rules of the game as well as those by which the real world generally abides. It develops, in other words, and for all that Ree deploys the sylvan beauty of World of Warcraft's game mode, his film is finally and firmly about the people who play these games, in a way the proponents of AI, to name one threat to film culture, would struggle to tolerate. More so than Grand Theft Hamlet, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin communicates the appeal of gaming, even to those of us who've long since put down the joypad. As the horizons of the real world close down, limited by the conservatism of those who would control our movements and run that world for the benefit of an elite few, those of the virtual realm seem to open up, expand, beckon. The possibilities here, at least, remain endless.

Grand Theft Hamlet opens in selected cinemas from today; The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is now streaming via Netflix.

In memoriam: Marshall Brickman (Telegraph 04/12/24)

Marshall Brickman, who has died aged 85, was an Oscar- and BAFTA-winning screenwriter who helped redefine Woody Allen’s screen persona with his work on Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979).

Born four years apart, the pair had met a decade earlier, when the bespectacled, soft-featured Brickman was working as head writer on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (1962-92), the late-night chatshow Allen often guest-hosted. Both had Jewish roots and musical inclinations; both were frustrated at being typecast as gagmen.

Accordingly, Allen recruited Brickman to expand the scope of his hitherto skittish movie endeavours. Razzing the largely mirthless science fiction that followed Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), their first collaboration Sleeper (1973) merely gestured towards comedy’s outer limits, scattering sight gags as it went. The pair’s next, however, emerged as a vastly more pointed and profound exploration.

Born of multiple rewrites and a free-ranging shoot, Annie Hall assumed haphazard shape in the edit suite, as Brickman later recalled: “When I saw the rough cut, I thought it terrible, completely unsalvageable. It rambled and was tangential and just… endless.”

Yet the more incisive 93-minute release version expanded comedy’s horizons, principally by allowing for the prospect of romantic failure and disillusionment. Critics were wowed; cinemagoers stirred to the extent it remained Allen’s biggest hit for the next 34 years. With the director-star a no-show at the 1978 Oscars, Brickman duly collected a screenplay gong, one of four wins on the night, including Best Picture.

Manhattan drew from a comparable well of personal experience, its protagonist a gagman who’s quit television to try and pen the great American novel. Even in 1979, the relationship between the 42-year-old hero and a 17-year-old schoolgirl raised eyebrows – Pauline Kael wondered “What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?” – but the movie’s lustrous look seduced critics, audiences and awards voters alike.

The pair parted professionally thereafter, although Allen later afforded Brickman co-writer credit on Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), a goofy whodunnit that reworked material arrived at in early drafts of Annie Hall. Cheery critics noted the film restored an element increasingly lacking from Allen’s solo projects of the 1980s and early 1990s: big, uncomplicated laughs.

Marshall Jacob Brickman was born in Rio de Janeiro on August 25, 1939 to Polish immigrant Abram Brickman and his wife Pauline (née Wolin); asked why he was born in Rio, the adult Brickman once quipped “I wanted to be near my mother.” The family relocated to Brooklyn in 1943, where the young Marshall attended Brooklyn Technical High School before studying medicine and music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Music initially presented as Brickman’s chosen path. In 1962, he joined folk trio The Tarriers, whose 1963 album New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass later provided Deliverance (1972) with unforgettable soundtrack cues. A subsequent Brickman ensemble, The New Journeymen, featured John and Michelle Phillips before The Mamas and the Papas.

Brickman started writing on 1960’s first season of Candid Camera and began a seven-year stint on The Tonight Show in 1963, surviving a close shave in August 1969, when he turned down an invitation to Sharon Tate’s house on the night of the Manson Family murders. A creative consultant on The Dick Cavett Show (1969-1975), he also contributed to Sex and Violence (1975), the second of two pilots for The Muppet Show (1976-1981).

Post-Manhattan, Brickman began directing with Simon (1980), in which psychology professor Alan Arkin claims he’s been abducted by aliens; the Allenesque Lovesick (1983) saw psychiatrist Dudley Moore dogged by the spectre of Sigmund Freud (Alec Guinness). Yet after teen pic The Manhattan Project (1986) bombed, he reverted to screenwriting, penning the Bette Midler vehicle For the Boys (1991), and enjoyed a lucrative stage hit as co-creator of the Tony-winning Jersey Boys.

In 2017, two years after the Writers Guild of America voted Annie Hall the funniest screenplay of all time, Brickman reflected on his relationship with Allen, to whom – throughout all the trials and tribulations – he’d remained loyal: “When we were younger… we’d see these two old guys sitting munching on a pretzel with their pains, and we’d make remarks about them. And now we are them. We can’t believe it.”

He is survived by his wife, the producer Nina Feinberg, and their two daughters.

Marshall Brickman, born August 25, 1939, died November 29, 2024.

Dog mom: "Nightbitch"

Marielle Heller's adaptation of the Rachel Yoder novel Nightbitch alights upon a bold opening gambit: an apparently straightforward scene of supermarket conversation wherein, told by a friend how wonderful it must be to be spending so much time at home with her son, an artist played by a newly mumsy Amy Adams launches into an increasingly fraught monologue revealing her worst thoughts and fears. An eruption in an everyday setting; ordinary interaction pushed into the realms of mania. As Heller sets about channelling the pressures of parenthood, and motherhood in particular, Nightbitch will return time and again to that same tactic. Said child drops an inherited F-bomb in the closing stages of a library Book Babies gathering, stunning the room into renewed silence. Returning home, his mother notices hair sprouting from her chin and lower back, and later additional nipples growing on her torso; soon, mama is expressing a desire to curl up on a couch or snarl at those around her. If you've read the book, you'll already know that our heroine, credited only as "Mother", is turning day by day into a dog of some variety; Yoder's thesis was that motherhood makes you feral, and leaves you wanting to run free. The movie adaptation bounds up as an odd pup, hybrid in its nature. Somewhere in its DNA is the old Disney comedy The Shaggy D.A. (remade with Tim Allen as The Shaggy Dog), albeit sheared of its reverence towards family. Equally, though, there are points where Nightbitch begins to resemble something else entirely: a Jeanne Dielmann... of the multiplexes.

Notice, for one, the repetition Heller works into the early stages of what's notionally a mainstream comedy, outlining the heroine's daily routines: the cooking and feeding and dressing and cleaning and nurturing and affirming, all the work that can take the place of a career set to maternity leave. It's funny, in this context; but it also cuts to how exhausting and numbing it must be in reality, especially when you're operating as all but a one-woman show. Heller slyly delays the arrival of the kid's father on the scene: he's played by Scoot McNairy, with his magnificently rubbery, slappable face, as a man who's taken altogether blithely to this parenting lark, in large part because he gets off scot free when he leaves for the office every morning. Yet that clears more space for Nightbitch's primary selling point: one of the best comic actors of her age, doing a very solid job in a role that asks a lot of her (and finally, maybe, too much). Adams gamely undergoes the deglamorising physical transformation, and is terrific in her scenes with the kid (Heller makes her subtlest point by casting relative sweethearts - twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden - in the latter role); she's a conduit for the very specific, blackly funny tone her director is going for - reassuring new mothers and male viewers alike that it's okay to laugh at some of this - but she also, occasionally, seems to summon a wild maternal rage. When the light goes out of her eyes, she's terrifying, and we know someone's in trouble. Heller has other weapons at her disposal: a judiciously stocked supporting cast, two or three of the finest cuts of the year, deployed to underline a point or simply slap us out of any complacency. But it's around Adams that Nightbitch feels strongest, most confident and most coherent.

That coherence, alas, begins to wane from the halfway point. Running to a skimpy-seeming 99 minutes, the theatrical version of Nightbitch has been cut to the bone, if not ripped to shreds; possibly the thinking was that one target audience will have babysitters to relieve, but mostly it bears the look of a film that was made subject to an especially torturous test-screening process, with scenes that come and go in the blink of an eye, and strands that develop more erratically than one would like. That it shapes up as by far the least assured of Heller's films is partly down to the high bar this writer-director has set for herself (The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), but mostly down to how, from a perilously early stage, Nightbitch suggests a film that exists in many versions, each taking different paths to get to the point where the heroine is digging with her bare hands in the back garden and chasing after squirrels. At times, Heller appears to be juggling just as much as her heroine, trying to please everyone all of the time. There are questions I don't think even this release cut finds the answers to: how literally are we meant to take this transformation? How hard does Heller want to lean into the horror of this situation? How do you make a fantasy film for adults in 2024, and how do you make a fantasy film for adults that, at every turn, is still somehow in touch with lived reality? It may well have been easier for Yoder to finesse all this working on her own on the page than it has been for Heller in the context of a studio-funded awards contender; either way, this cut is broken-backed in a way that goes far beyond describing its heroine's predicament. If I retain a certain sympathy for Nightbitch, it's because its best scenes - early on, before the test audiences grew restless - hint at a rare mainstream comedy with claws and teeth. It's been a difficult gestational period, clearly; is there a chance we'll see a director's cut in a further nine months?

Nightbitch opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

At sea: "Moana 2"

The sight of cinemas overflowing with folks of all ages as Christmas approaches is pretty cheering. It would more cheering still if so much of the business being conducted therein weren't such a grubby cashgrab. Wicked: Part 1 is one half of a movie we're being invited to pay for again in twelve months; Moana 2 turns out to be showing in 3D, which everybody bar James Cameron has long since conceded is a bill of goods, and which is especially rich given that Disney's latest was originally greenlit as a straight-to-streaming TV series. (Perhaps this is the last avenue our increasingly desperate corporate entertainments have left to them: pickpocketing.) Anyway, once you've sourced an old pair of glasses from the back of the downstairs drawer of stuff and forked over the 3D surcharge to cover all the family, you can settle back, relax and peer through greasy lenses at a dingier reprise of a film that has, in the years since 2016, staked a serious claim to being the strongest Disney animation this side of the millennium, the thinking person's Frozen. (Setting aside my outlier affection for 2000's gags-for-gags'-sake The Emperor's New Groove, I can't think of any better New Disney.) I say dingier, because even the sequences in Moana 2 that take place at high noon fall subject to 3D's perpetual dusk. (A simple experiment: drag your glasses down your nose from time to time, and notice how bright the image on screen is, compared to what you're actually watching.) Nevertheless, it's clear these animators - under the direction of Dana Ledoux Miller, Jason Hand and David G. Derrick Jr., the latter a holdover from the planned series - have been given carte blanche to push the visuals far beyond the scope of the first movie. Those once-colourful skies are now truly hallucinogenic, the prevailing idea of Pacific dreamtime only more surreal, and we tumble through worlds within worlds within worlds. Here is the best family film of the season to smuggle gummies of the non-pick-'n'-mix variety into. Here is also a pretty formidable demonstration of the power of the processor chip, its ability to convert what were originally smaller-screen imaginings into fully cinematic visions.

It's good we have such wonders to goggle at for ninety-odd minutes, because what we're listening to and trying to engage with on a narrative level proves far less impressive. The first movie sent its heroine on a life-or-death mission to expand the horizons of her people. The second merely wonders what to do with her for an hour and a half. Actually, that's a little unfair: after a half-hour of chewy exposition (something something uniting a people something), homilies about choosing who we are and endless visitations from ghosts and gods, a decision is reached to set Moana afloat anew, this time with a clutch of supporting characters, and then see what drifts into view. The script is as episodic as TV in its construction, which scans, although some of these episodes are rather enjoyable: an encounter with some unusually aggressive coconuts, a Verne-ish voyage to the bottom of the sea, a duel with cyclones. Moana 2 may actually have some of The Emperor's New Groove's devil-may-care looseness in its DNA, which is no bad thing, but too much of it feels goofy and temporary rather than mythic in any affecting and lasting way; the difference between the first film and this is that between first-wave Star Wars and the TV spinoffs being knocked out forty years on. It's great that the animation is this fluid, so a man who is also a god (with tattoos that move!) can turn first into a shark and then a bird of prey. Narratively, however, Moana 2 makes landfall as somewhere between hazy and vaporous, a light mizzle, where its predecessor was properly oceanic and engulfing. The songs are tuneful enough, though the absence of Lin-Manuel Miranda this time means there's nothing to match "How Far I'll Go", the "Defying Gravity" of 2016. Instead, we're offered echoes of past excellence - literally so when the hear-me-roar declaration "I am Moana" recurs at the climax of new song "Beyond" - and a showtune called "Get Lost" that sounds a decidedly self-reflexive note. I had reasonable fun sat before Moana 2, but - beyond a certain point - I honestly couldn't tell you what was going on, save an elevated form of doodling, a most spectacular data leak.

Moana 2 is now playing in cinemas nationwide.