‘Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Streams’ Review: This ‘Yellow Submarine’-Like French Toon Is a Trip
It’s Juliette’s fifth birthday, and she can wish for whatever she wants. Top of her list is an adventure, the likes of which this restless girl has only read about in books — specifically, a series of fantasy novels about a capricious wizard who controls the wind. In “Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Streams,” a quiet afternoon takes an unpredictable, eye-popping turn, as Juliette (voiced by Loïse Charpentier) and her 8-year-old sister Carmen (Maryne Bertieaux) are whisked away to a dazzling surreal world of alligator-shaped airships and bird-headed opera divas, where seemingly anything can happen.
Welcome to the imagination of French director Benoît Chieux, who has crafted — in the year 2023, against considerable odds — a truly spectacular psychedelic excursion in the vein of head-trip classics “The Fantastic Planet” and “The Yellow Submarine.” It’s been roughly half a century since those two movies demonstrated just how liberating the medium of animation can be, but you wouldn’t know it to watch Chieux’s hand-drawn curio, which takes the mesmerizing dream logic of such projects and applies is to an “Alice in Wonderland”-style plot.
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But will kids go for it? My feeling says that even though Chieux and co-writer Alain Gagnol (“A Cat In Paris”) have designed the experience with younger viewers in mind, it’s the oddity-seeking art-house crowd that will most appreciate the film, which looks as if it was crafted decades ago in a flurry of creative (possibly drug-enhanced) inspiration and then lost to time, à la “Son of the White Mare” or Luigi Serafini’s brain-bending “Codex Seraphinianus” (which isn’t animated, but oughta be). So, while clearly intended for children, “Sirocco” seems better suited for mind-altered midnight screenings in the years to come.
Audiences meet the title character first, who’s described as a lonely sorcerer — a floating figure with long blue hair, yellow skin and a single jellyfish eye, peering out from beneath a floppy, broad-brimmed hat. Sirocco’s temper can unleash powerful storms, which is why no one else in the kingdom dares come close, or so we’re told by Agnès (Géraldine Asselin), the exhausted fantasy writer who’s agreed to babysit the two sisters. As in “The Wizard of Oz,” Sirocco is a mysterious, all-powerful character who looms large and menacing, until a mere child (in this case, Juliette) proves not to be the least bit intimidated by his threats.
While Agnès lays down for a much-needed nap, Juliette and Carmen play in her library, where a googly-eyed character pops off the pages of one of her books: a talking wooden toy with a talent for teleportation, who unwittingly opens a passage as it hopscotches back to the parallel dimension from whence it came. Following it home, the two girls are instantly transformed, sporting cat heads, whiskers and long striped tails. The more cautious of the sisters, Carmen is wary of their new surroundings, but Juliette doesn’t seem to mind in the slightest, recognizing details from the Sirocco books and wanting to explore things for herself.
While the goal of such stories is inevitably to get home, for audiences, the pleasure comes in discovering all the unusual places and characters they encounter along the way — a formula Chieux understands well enough, taking time to explore Sirocco’s realm and rewarding our curiosity at each turn with wondrous (and wonderfully silly) details, like the desert creature that scuttles across the sand and attaches itself to an exotic-looking mushroom, sprouting tiny propellers and puttering off on the breeze. Everything, from the building-block cities piled high with teetering apartments (no wonder their denizens fear the wind!) to the bubble-blowing music box that Juliette brattily knocks on its head, hooks and holds the attention, such that the plot hardly matters. And good thing, since the script is at once too slight and overly confusing.
It’s not clear how Agnès is related to these two girls, if at all, or why a character named Selma is so central to her Sirocco books. On some level, the movie serves as a tribute to sisters, who might argue with one another from time to time, but share a special, unbreakable bond. Eventually, it’s revealed that Agnès invented the Kingdom of Air Currents — the fantasy world where all her stories are set — as a way of preserving the memory of her late sister, which brings a note of melancholy to the otherwise picaresque format.
The clearest indication of Chieux’s intended tone is the film’s score, composed by Pablo Pico: delicate piano and light winds (naturally) that bloom into something truly ethereal when local pop star Selma, a star-crossed love interest of sorts for Sirocco, reveals her voice — a sequence where the film’s unique look and sound fuse together brilliantly. Selma’s otherworldly performance (delivered by Célia Kameni) adds so much that Chieux should have embraced that element even more. Some toons sag when characters start to sing, whereas “Sirocco” practically begs to be a musical.
In any case, Selma takes an instant shine to Juliette, offering to help the girl rescue her sister from a shotgun wedding in another corner of the kingdom. And so the adventure continues, as Chieux takes his cues from various Studio Ghibli films. For a time, fans wondered who might step up to take Hayao Miyazake’s place when the anime master retired, and while no clear successor has emerged, his legacy is alive and well around the world. “Sirocco” suggests France’s answer to a film like “Spirited Away,” by way of all the other aforementioned references — and yet, there’s an originality to it that keeps things surprising. In the end, Juliette gets her wish, but if I had one, it would be that Chieux keep sharing his dreams on the big screen.
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