Something to watch tonight: Thursday 4 December

Long Way North (Chayé, 2015)

Back in July 2017, while I was mak­ing one of my reg­u­lar sub­sti­tute appear­ances on RNZ At the Movies, I said this about Long Way Home:

I would expect the film will even­tu­ally be like so many oth­ers – a pleas­ant sur­prise, tucked away in the far corners of some stream­ing ser­vice or oth­er, so – if you do stumble across it, you might be pleas­antly surprised.

And now that time has come!

I also said: 

… if school hol­i­day fare is what you are after – and you don’t want to feed your kids the high fructose corn syr­up of Despicable Me 3 – you could seek out the hearty anim­ated good­ness of the French/Danish co-production Long Way North. Your kids will hate you for it, but you can sleep a little easi­er know­ing that for an hour and a half you aren’t rot­ting their teeth.

The set­ting is St Petersburg in 1882. In one of great homes by the river, teen­age Sasha is show­ing off the new sci­entif­ic lib­rary that’s about to opened by the Tsar’s neph­ew. It’s named after her grand­fath­er, the great explorer Oloukine – the man who dis­covered the north-west pas­sage and a nation­al hero. He is miss­ing pre­sumed dead after an exped­i­tion to the North Pole and the Tsar has pos­ted a reward for any­one who can find him – not to men­tion the very expens­ive ship he was sailing.

In the lib­rary, Sasha finds a clue that sug­gests all the search­ers had been look­ing in the wrong place and that night at the cel­eb­ra­tion ball, when she tries to per­suade the import­ant politi­cian respons­ible for nam­ing the lib­rary she insults him and her fam­ily loses the honour.

But young Sasha is not eas­ily thwarted. She runs away from home, takes a train to Norway and tries to buy pas­sage to the Arctic Circle. The hard-bitten Scandinavian sail­ors take her for a ride instead, leav­ing her with noth­ing but her clue from the lib­rary and a job in the loc­al pub – the White Bear.

Because of her stub­born­ness, resource­ful­ness and a very expens­ive pair of ear­rings, Sasha per­suades the cap­tain of the Norge to search for Granddad. What an adventure!

Just as they find evid­ence that they are in the right track, ice­bergs sink the Norge and they have no choice but to sol­dier on even though most of the crew think it’s a point­less jour­ney. And that’s before the polar bears turn up.

Long Way North won the audi­ence choice award at the Annecy Animation Film Festival in 2015 and you can see why. It looks like a gor­geous pic­ture book, very two-dimensional with flat panes of col­our as if each frame was from a paint­ing by num­bers kit. There aren’t many frames either – action is a little jerky rather than the super-smooth Hollywood product. I found the look of the film quite endear­ing and quite peace­ful. It feels hand­made. The St Petersburg city­scapes espe­cially are quite beautiful.

Also reviewed in that 19 July 2017 ATM show: The Journey (Timothy Spall as Rev. Ian Paisley and Colm Meaney as the IRA’s Martin McGuinness try and nego­ti­ate a Good Friday agree­ment) and War for the Planet of the Apes.

Where to watch Long Way North

Aotearoa: Streaming on Māori+ (free with ads)

Australia: Digital rental

Canada: Digital rental

India: Not cur­rently available

Ireland: Digital rental

USA: Streaming on Prime Video or Fubo (paid sub­scrip­tions) or The Roku Channel or ShoutTV (free with ads)

UK: Digital rental