
Audio By Carbonatix
French animator Michel Ocelot‘s sophisticated children’s film Azur and Asmar begins strangely and mysteriously, with an Arabic nanny cooing ancient tales into the ears of two boy babes — one pale, blond and blue-eyed, and the other dark with curly black hair. The computer-generated animation is a bit strange, too, its effect seeming to drop the viewer into a high-quality video game, but it’s also visually stunning: color-splashed, with intricate and stylized details borrowed from Islamic mosaics and miniature Persian paintings. Azur, it turns out, is the woman’s charge, and Asmar her son, but she raises them as brothers until Azur’s European father takes him away, to another life across the sea. But the gorgeously wrought fairy tale that ensues brings the brothers back together on a shared quest to find and wed the powerful Djinn Fairy of their mother’s long-ago song.
While it might not make as big a splash as Spirited Away or WALL-E, Ocelot’s beautiful palette paints a moving picture well-suited to kids and adults alike; Azur and Asmar opens today for a week-long run at Starz FilmCenter, in the Tivoli building on the Auraria campus. For showtimes and tickets, go to www.starzfilmcenter.com or call 303-595-3456.
Jan. 23-29, 2009