Movie review: The Amazing Maurice

The Amazing Maurice is an animated comedy drama. Image / Supplied

The Amazing Maurice (123 mins, rating PG)

Screening in cinemas now

Directed by Toby Genkel and Florian Westermann

There’s a lot that’s classic and familiar in The Amazing Maurice, an animated comedy-drama. Intelligent talking animals, a serious capable girl who meets a goofy boy who loves her, a quest, secret passages, wonderfully conceived traps, hilarious rescues, a shattered Utopian dream, corrupt people in power, a trick that makes the wicked characters expose themselves as criminals, and finally — the triumph of good over evil. There’s a lot that’s different too, starting with the story itself.

Set mainly in and around a fairytale medieval German town called Bad Blintz, with crooked houses and streets, there’s an overall European flavour. Grimm’s fairytales meet Dr Seuss.

Terry Rossio, who poked fun at traditional fairytales as the writer of Shrek, based the story on a rather bizarre, extremely complicated 2001 story by Terry Pratchett, with a nod to the Pied Piper of Hamelin that is promptly turned on its head. Rossio’s script is a bit wordy, adapting Pratchett is a big ask, but the voices are good to listen to and for a pleasant change, the accents are English.

Terry Pratchett’s story is a Wasgij view of the pied piper story where rats who are in on the act are piped away from the town they’ve been infesting, for a fee they will share with the mastermind, the one and only daring, determined, clever, greedy Maurice (voiced by Hugh Laurie).

Serious, capable Malicia, voiced by Game of Thrones’ Emelia Clarke, has all the story threads in her hands. Everything stems from the distress of Bad Blintz’s mayor, Malicia’s father, voiced by Hugh Bonneville, who has to find a solution to the apparently linked problems of disappearing food, the hunger of his people and a plague of rats.

Somewhat annoyingly, Malicia talks directly to the audience, to introduce a book, Mr Bunnsy Has An Adventure, which looks like a Beatrice Potter, but is actually a Terry Pratchett creation, illustrated for the film by concept artist Heiko Hentschel. Malicia explains that the book is a framing device for the other main thread of the story, in which the book becomes a map to the paradise the team of rats seeks.

The rats are cutely named after cans of food found in rubbish dumps. Standouts are Peaches (Gemma Arterton) and tapdancing Sardines (Joe Sugg). The human with the most appeal is Malicia’s goofy wannabe boyfriend Keith, voiced by Himesh Patel (Enola Holmes).

The scariest of all the many evil characters out to get Maurice and the rats is the vast, shape-shifting, enormously sinister black blob called the Boss Man or King Rat (David Thewlis, The Theory of Everything) who is brilliantly drawn, a much more successfully created image than Maurice himself, who lacks a bit of depth.

Some excellent visual effects. Memorable characters. Younger children might need a hand to hold.

Recommended family entertainment.

Movies are rated: Avoid, Recommended, Highly recommended and Must see.

The first person to bring an image or hardcopy of this review to Starlight Cinema Taupō qualifies for a free ticket to The Amazing Maurice.