Thought I’d see this based alone on how it handles the character of Nick, a rare side protagonist with cerebral palsy. Respectfully, I can confirm! No Hollywood family blockbuster at least outside of Netflix would think to grant disabled children this extent of visibility, at least not intentionally (Katie and Aaron Mitchell remain peak subtextual neurodivergent representation in my eyes), and such thematic ambition is where European films like this – for all their bland qualities – should succeed most if not all the time. There are a couple of dream sequences in which Nick imagines himself as able to walk and fully move his arms, but it’s not insensitive enough that he imagines himself as speaking either (The Shape of Water, anyone?). When a couple of ableist adopting parents who cannot bear the “burden” turn him down and the first friend he’s ever found holds him close, it’s genuinely difficult for someone like me to watch without crying. When he gets to make friends, it’s more than comforting. And I’m sure a ton of children will be overjoyed to see this much wheelchair power on screen, to see a paralytic main character with this much intelligence and love. Whoever got to animate Nick deserves a whole bunch of awards.On paper, this is really the sort of cute entertainment kids are better off with in the realm of CGI: kids just being kids; writing that doesn’t try to be witty and avoids wisecracks; animal sidekicks that nevertheless don’t look Disney-fied; a simple Western adventure boasting beautiful scenery and a smart outlook on prejudice, siding with immigrants, colonised people and marginalised groups without tokenising anyone; slave owners and British colonisers getting their butts kicked. As for the parents, there’s a little Taxi Driver joke peppered in as well as a character who looks like he could be a crush amongst many in the animation community.Of course, it all comes crashing down the moment we are introduced to one of two repetitive albeit plot-relevant fart and poop jokes – apparently the only way you can get young multiplex audiences to pay attention these days – and the otherwise supportive Native American representation loses a hint of plausibility when the white children easily bridge an unlikely alliance between the Cheyenne and a group of settlers to fight the slave owners. Then again, the film also portrays buffalo as animals you can easily approach in the wild only to clarify in the credits that you shouldn’t do this. The sentimentality works beautifully in the case of Nick – bear in mind he is based on director Pedro Solís’ late son – but such niceness can only go hand-in-hand with this style of animation for so long, and in the end it’s another half-successful attempt to warm hearts and jerk tears using the most standard and cutesy 3D character animation, plus a bunch of racists literally crapping their pants. They can’t all be Calamity! But while mainstream European CG animation has a long way to go before it can establish itself as largely far removed from the safest of Pixar and DreamWorks stereotypes, if more of these films could come from a place of sincerity and simplicity and make an effort to not look down on younger audiences, put this much focus on offering them something Disney or Illumination can’t, then there would be hope for this industry yet.
