![]() ![]() Animation frees such adrenaline-rush sequences from gravity, allowing endless loop-de-loops and thrilling tricks no physical camera could manage. Like falling down a garbage incinerator chute, or zooming along a rickety roller coaster track, à la mine cart scene from “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (or, for today’s kids, like the CGI-liberated one in “Journey to the Center of the Earth”). Ever since his father’s disappearance, Lubicchi has been a little short on friends (bullies are easier to come by), but as soon as he pairs up with Poupelle, they’re constantly getting into trouble together. Still, the approach frees up the film’s entire way of framing, allowing the virtual camera to swoop and spin 360 degrees around the action.Īnd there’s a lot more action than you might think. Characters move like puppets, as if controlled by invisible strings, and the vivid watercolor texture looks like some kind of filter. Individual frames can be quite beautiful, but our brains aren’t fooled into believing that what we’re seeing was sketched by hand. The result can be a little distracting at times. The project doesn’t look like Studio 4☌’s other productions (“Children of the Sea,” “Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko”) in that it applies a faux line-traced finish to three-dimensional digital rigs: CGI disguised as traditional anime. Lubicchi is cute, with his signature top hat, bowtie and cloak (plus a pair of widely spaced front teeth that suggest a vampire’s understudy), while Poupelle fools everybody when he magically appears one Halloween, his cobbled-together appearance easily mistaken for a costume at first. But leave it to director Yusuke Hirota and the team at Studio 4☌ (“Tekkonkinkreet”) - plus the charms of voice actor Tony Hale, who also played the spork in “Toy Story 4” - to turn this junk-monster reject into one of the year’s most endearing animated characters.Īdapted from a popular picture book by Japanese illustrator Akihiro Nishino, “Poupelle of Chimney Town” is an animated buddy movie, a high-energy believe-in-yourself adventure and a fantastical social fable all rolled into one. This stinky scarecrow-looking character (whose name, through no coincidence, sounds an awful lot like “poubelle,” the French word for “trash can”) might not seem like the most appealing of companions, what with his broken umbrella hat, rust-bucket jaw and dangling rubber hoses for hair. ![]() To prove his theory, this pint-sized Galileo’s gonna need help, and he finds it in the form of an unlikely friend, magically brought to life one night from the local landfill - a literal “garbage man” he decides to call Poupelle. The lone exception, a bobble-headed boy named Lubicchi (Antonio Raul Corbo), is always looking up, determined to prove to everyone that there’s something beyond all that “smoky smoke.” You see, it’s not always easy to tell the trash from the treasure in Chimney Town, a richly imagined steampunk metropolis where smokestacks crowd the skyline, belching so much thick black haze into the air that an entire generation of soot-covered townspeople has ceased to believe in the stars. “ Poupelle of Chimney Town” begins where “Toy Story 3” ends, with a daring escape from a dangerous garbage incinerator.
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