Big winter fun found in Snowtime!
Lovely animated Canadian film a tad preachy and somewhat intrusive but still a joy
Snowtime! is an animated children’s film that just happened to have been the highest grossing Canadian film of 2015 — even though it only played in Quebec. Originally released in French as La Guerre Des Tuques, the movie had its English-language debut at Sundance last month and will now charm audiences in the rest of Canada.
The story unfolds in a small, sleepy village in winter. It’s school break, and the kids don’t have much to do. They eventually form teams and organize a massive snowball fight, which gets more interesting when the local genius kid, Frankie (voice of Sandra Oh), builds a complicated fort.
The town has its share of kids who are oddballs or outsiders, but they all work together on the wild snowball battle. There’s a bit of flirting among a couple of 11-year-olds — a local kid named Luke and a feisty newcomer named Sophie — and plenty of antiwar talk; Luke’s father died in a war (which prompts some interesting alternate animation to illustrate a flashback.) For this viewer, the antiwar material seemed preachy and somewhat intrusive, but Snowtime! has other things going for it — like the happy absence of adults. It also has lovely animation, good storytelling and an easy pace, with none of the frantic ‘noise’ kids’ movies so often have.
Alas, the warmongering involved in a snowball skirmish cannot go unpunished, and so Snowtime! also includes a tragedy involving the family pet — do NOT bring really young children to see this movie. To make a snowball fight seem like this much fun and then lay on a terrible lesson seems somewhat disingenuous.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.