Animation has the facility to make even the only feelings really feel as infinite and expressive as our most sacred recollections, which — regardless of the edifying nuance and eye-popping aptitude of current movies resembling “Encanto” and “Throughout the Spider-Verse” — could make it irritating that American studios have largely been trending towards overcomplicated plots and sensible design. Sébastien Laudenbach and Chiara Malta’s extraordinarily French “Hen for Linda” is the clearest doable reminder of what we’ve been lacking. It’s about an eight-year-old woman named Linda who desires to eat hen for dinner. Pleasant mayhem ensues.
As in Laudenbach’s “The Woman With out Palms,” all the characters are traced with thick black traces that lend them the aspirational chance of a trend sketch; every of them is stuffed in with a single swash of shade that spills over the charcoal borders of their physique each time they get excited. Linda (voiced by Melinée Leclerc) is yellow, as a result of that’s her favourite shade. Her exasperated single mother Paulette (Clotilde Hesme) is orange. Their pet cat Gazza is purple, Linda’s yoga trainer aunt (Laetitia Dosch as Astrid) is a smooth pink, and the hen who ties this complete story collectively is a clucking brown-red blur who looks like one other fowl altogether each time he exposes his brilliant white underbelly.
There are three great musical numbers written by Clément Ducol, however they really feel extra like incidental reveries than full-blown showtunes, as characters sing to themselves concerning the stress of elevating children and the candy aid of consolation meals. Carried by the meandering lilt of a traditional Michel Legrand tune (and conveying their identical capacity to infuse a lifetime of heart-wrenching melancholy right into a stanza that appears as informal as respiratory), the final of those little ditties moved me to tears, because the purity of this movie’s development instantly punctured a tiny pinhole into the depths of that interior darkness the place all of our half-forgotten recollections go. No disrespect to the equally Proustian rewards of “Ratatouille,” however here’s a 73-minute film — animated by about 10 individuals — that manages to ship twice the flavour with a fraction of the components.
Just like the stewed greens that spirit Anton Ego again to his childhood, the peppery hen dish that Linda desires for dinner is loaded with much more private that means than she’s keen to confess: Its taste is probably the most palpable reminiscence she has of her Italian father, who died when Linda was even youthful, and exists now solely as a meal that her frazzled mother by no means has sufficient time to cook dinner (many of the meals Paulette makes for her daughter comes out of the microwave). Her late father narrates the film from throughout the black gap of Linda’s reminiscence (a spot that’s “black like going to mattress and not using a bedtime story”), however the effectively is just too deep for Linda to listen to no matter jaunty musings whisper as much as her from inside.
Moreover, her thoughts is just too busy sorting by means of the sort of echoes that encourage children to hunt chaos and seize shiny issues with out fascinated with the implications. Shiny issues just like the inexperienced ring that Linda’s dad as soon as gave to Paulette, and that Paulette desires to put on on the uncommon night time out she’s decided to take pleasure in after abruptly dumping her daughter at Astrid’s home. When Paulette notices the ring is lacking, she assumes that Linda should have stolen it — an assumption that Linda is slapped for denying.
Immediately overcome by a guilt that solely grows extra textured and intense after she discovers her lacking jewellery in a puddle of Gazza’s puke, the overextended mother cancels her plans and guarantees to offer Linda something her little coronary heart wishes (a promise accompanied by a piercingly correct music about how onerous it’s to say “no” to your children). Her little coronary heart wishes hen with peppers for dinner the following day. Paulette will not be a lot of a cook dinner, however she’s quickly confronted by a a lot larger drawback: A common strike has shuttered all the retailers in Paris, and Linda — a free-spirited however impatient type whose naturalistic cadence and emotional candor enable her to really feel much more like an actual child than the hyper-exaggerated caricatures of kid-ness who are inclined to populate animated movies — refuses to only let her mother off the hook till the labor disaster blows over.
And so it isn’t lengthy earlier than the determined Paulette is stealing a hen from a roadside farm. After which rushing away from the rookie policeman on her tail. After which hiding behind a truck whose lovestruck driver is deathly allergic to fowl. After which going to his mother’s home within the hopes that she may know find out how to kill the fowl. After which, after which, after which, after which, as this small however insistently madcap story begins to corkscrew again to the courtyard outdoors of Linda and Paulette’s condominium advanced, the place scores of kids — depicted in a memorable broad shot as a sea of open mouths — are hungry for one thing that may fulfill their appetites for the varied emotions they’re too younger to call.
“Hen for Linda” wants a supporting forged with the intention to fluff its wisp of a premise into the stuff of a feature-length movie, and the varied cutaways to Linda’s buddies assist anchor this story in a childlike nowness that permits it to play like a manic farce with life-or-death stakes. Regrettably, these peripheral characters additionally pull focus away from the meat of the motion (so to talk), stalling the momentum of a screwball plot that dangers the buzzkill of logic — and the wastefulness of creating viewers ask “what’s happening?” — each time the film returns to Linda and Paulette’s grand journey.
The identical might be mentioned of the scenes dedicated to Astrid, a candy-loving yoga trainer whose namaste vitality is amusingly offset by the trend she feels each time Paulette storms into her life with an pressing sister request. And but, the Fosse-like fantasticality of her music makes up for any method of sins, and her prevailing perspective of fed-up Frenchness provides a vital layer to the fog cloud of frustration that threatens to separate Linda and Paulette from their deepest emotions.
“Did one thing exist in case you don’t keep in mind it?,” Linda asks her mother throughout a late night time drive at one level. She’s speaking about her expertise of being within the womb, however — with a level of self-awareness as limpid and free-flowing because the patches of shade that slosh round Linda’s physique just like the feelings she will’t hope to comprise — she’s additionally speaking about her useless father, who has now disappeared into the identical darkish nothingness that introduced her into this world.
However she remembers him higher than she realizes, and one other style of the pepper hen dish he made might have the facility to carry him again to her like a house film that she will watch along with her eyes closed. Laudenbach and Malta’s animation speaks to that chance even when their script is preoccupied with different bits of enterprise, the seen brushstrokes in its storybook backdrops and fully-fleshed characters betraying the very sense of ephemerality that permits the film they comprise to stick with you. The small print fade, however the essence of what they recommend — the core reminiscence that retains them alive — stays clearer than ever, able to be re-traced and born anew in dwelling shade.
Grade: B+
GKIDS will launch “Hen for Linda” in theaters on Friday, April 5.