If you and your family can’t get into Mufasa: The Lion King this weekend then you could do worse than ... Okay, you couldn’t do much worse than this low-rent animation – a coproduction between Russia, Germany and Turkey – but there is an undeniable oddness to it that contrasts interestingly with the enormous Disney title. We can say one thing with some certainty. Dolphin Boy is surely the only kids’ film released this year to feature casual cockfighting.
It starts a little like a (let’s be kind) homage to Finding Nemo before heading back to land and taking on a more domestic quality. A young boy is adopted by dolphins after a plane crash and introduced to an array of eccentric underwater creatures. There is a scary octopus that will later get scarier still. Something like a turtle appears to be the benevolent despot. There is a fizzing electric eel and a dopey snail.
Mommy dolphin decides that she will keep the kid’s origins secret – he believes himself a deformed aquatic mammal – but his supposed brother, who seems a lot dumber than dolphins are rumoured to be, lets the truth slip during a visit to the site of the crash. In the course of that trip something even stranger happens. Unless I’ve got this wrong (and that’s entirely possible) the lads ingest some sort of plankton and find themselves lost in hallucinatory psychedelia. What in the name of bejaysus are we looking at here?
It would be wrong to say it gets weirder, but it does get even less predictable. Following ill-defined conflict, our hero and a fair portion of his dolphin chums get washed up on to land. He separates from them and becomes part of a human family. All the while he clutches a pendant apparently containing a photograph of his mother. And so on in a weird amble that eventually takes us to a reasonably zippy blowout.
Dolphin Boy review: What in the name of bejaysus are we looking at here?
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The animation looks horrible. The voice work is annoying. The plot is not always easy to follow. But Dolphin Boy has an against-the-odds integrity that proves easy to warm to. And, unless this was just Stockholm syndrome setting in, the songs are not at all terrible. So, yes, maybe you could do worse. Though I’d rather not.
In cinemas from Friday, December 20th
