After watching and greatly enjoying Luc Besson's sci fi movie The Fifth Element on 20 August 2023 (reviewed by me here), and his fantasy movie Angel-A on 21 August 2023 (reviewed by me here), both of which I'd read a lot about beforehand, I decided on 22 August 2023 to watch an English version of one of his French animated movies, Arthur and the Invisibles (aka Arthur and the Minimoys – the direct English translation of its original French title).
In contrast to the previous two, however, this was a Besson film that I knew nothing about beforehand, so I watched it with no preconceptions or expectations at all, and yet again I very much enjoyed it. Judging, moreover, from the numerous comments on IMDb and other movie websites praising it as a charming, delightful, original, classic children's fantasy movie, so too have many other viewers.
Not only directed and co-produced by Besson but also based upon the first two books (Arthur and the Minimoys and Arthur and the Forbidden City) in his self-penned Arthur series of children's books, Arthur and the Invisibles was originally released in 2006 as a 103-minute-long version in France. Here it was reviewed positively, performed well at the box office, and was re-released there a year later containing an extra 19 minutes of footage).
Conversely, in 2007 it was released as an edited 91-minute-long English-dubbed version by the Weinstein Company and MGM in the USA. Here it was reviewed negatively, underperformed at the box office, and contained numerous changes in order to Anglicize it, including retitling it as Arthur and the Invisibles. The British release of this latter version is the one that I watched on DVD and therefore describe from here onwards.
Intersecting live-action scenes with animated scenes (these latter constituting the major portion of this movie) and set in 1960, Arthur and the Invisibles tells how a 10-year-old boy named Arthur Montgomery is transported to an invisible realm of elf-like, benevolent mini-people, the Minimoys, located beneath the rural Connecticut house and gardens of his grandmother, Daisy Suchot, to seek and retrieve the priceless horde of rubies that his currently-missing grandfather Archibald Suchot hid there many years ago, in order to save his grandmother's house from being repossessed by a villainous land-grabbing Real Estate Agent.
However, Arthur finds himself also striving to assist the Minimoys themselves, who face a major plight of their own – saving their realm from the Evil M, a rogue and exceedingly malevolent Minimoy who plans to enslave all of them.
The animated scenes are packed to the rafters with eye-popping action, certainly there's never a dull moment amid the Minimoys, and these scenes are also rendered in dazzling multicoloured hues, yielding a vibrant vista throughout. But what is perhaps most amazing of all is the truly stellar calibre of stars featuring in the Weinstein Company's English version of this movie.
Yet with the exception of Mia Farrow who plays the grandmother and appears exclusively in the live-action sequences, none of the megastars in question are actually seen, providing voices for the main animated characters instead.
They include the likes of Madonna (voicing the Minimoys' feisty Princess Selenia, who reluctantly partners Arthur in their jointly-conducted respective quests), David Bowie (voicing the Evil M), Robert De Niro (the Minimoys' Emperor, and therefore Selenia's father), Snoop Dogg, Harvey Keitel, Jason Bateman, and Emilio Estevez, plus David Suchet as the Narrator and Luc Besson himself making a cameo appearance as a Minimoy. Arthur is played in the live-action scenes by Freddie Highmore, who also voices his character in the animated ones.
Arthur and the Minimoys is the first movie in a trilogy of Arthur-themed French animated films. There is also a version that combines the second and third movies into a single English-dubbed movie, entitled Arthur and the Great Adventure, released in 2010.
If you'd like to join Arthur and pay a brief but thrilling visit to the world of the Minimoys, please click here to watch an official trailer for Arthur and the Invisibles on YouTube.
Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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