The animated adventures of an orphaned chick growing up on a Côte d’Azur cliff face never takes flight
Parents of little kids: don’t mistake the classy English-dub voice casting of Kate Winslet and Willem Dafoe for a quality German animation about an orphaned swift raised by seagulls. Virtually laugh-free, so-so looking with a seriously drippy musical number, it feels like a film slipped into cinemas over summer to sucker parents desperate to do something, anything, to fill a couple of hours.
The story is familiar from a dozen children’s films, with sizeable debt to The Jungle Book. Josh Keaton voices the little swift Manou, whose parents are killed before he hatches on the side of a cliff along the Côte d’Azur. All alone in the world, baby Manou finds his way into the nest of a pair of gulls (voiced by Winslet and Dafoe), who raise him as their son, despite seagulls and swifts being sworn enemies. But, as he grows up, Manou becomes painfully aware that he’s not like other gulls.
