From the moment she bursts through the door, five-year-old Juliette (Charpentier) has more than a little of My Neighbor Totoro’s chaos-causing little sister Mei about her. Of course, she’s the one who sends order tumbling when she and big sister Carmen (Bertieaux) manage to hopscotch their way into the Kingdom of Winds, a wondrous place that references the three Ms (Moebius, Miyazaki, and Maurice Sendak) with a dash of Jazz Age French poster art. After all, this dusty fantasyland didn’t spring from a child’s mind, but that of Agnès (Asselin), the author who babysits them.
This magical realm, the titular kingdom of Sirocco and the Kingdom of Winds, is found within the pages of the multitude of illustrated books that she has penned. It’s subtly different to the “real” world, which looks more like Richard Scarry storyboarding an episode of Arthur. Yet the two are interwoven through Agnès’ inner life, and so Carmen and Juliette are taking a fantastic voyage through her subconscious. Heady stuff indeed for a cartoon in which a girl is turned into a cat and forced to wear a cat costume because she’s not feline enough.
This Belgian animated fable has been dubbed “psychedelic,” which here simply means childlike. There’s something slightly tedious about the instinct to attribute imagination to chemical stimulation, an instinct that both diminishes the ingenuity of childish wonder and always feels like a way for adults to excuse the fact that they’re enjoying something so fantastical. Honestly, it still feels like we’re paying the consequences of Jefferson Airplane suborning Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Instead, Sirocco is like Lewis Carroll’s greatest creation because it places children within an absurd world whose residents do not recognize its absurdity. From a malaprop-spouting wooden toy (Morteau) to bulbous, pompous toad creatures and an elegant avian diva with a secret (Konaté), the Kingdom of the Wind is ludicrous and perilous but not dangerous, and that’s an important distinction. Within its bold lines and block colors, director Benoît Chieux (who cowrote the script with Phantom Boy creator Alain Gagnol) creates a world of wonder in which the magician Sirocco (Lognay) must control a literal storm of emotions.
As with any film that deals with adult emotions in a way that children can appreciate, Sirocco must walk a fine line. It does so delicately, if with a few wobbles, especially the deeper it gets into how Agnès is contending with the loss of her sister through the books and within the kingdom. Chieux and Gagnol are at their strongest as storytellers when they’re examining the bonds between siblings, but that’s challenged by the fact that, even though this is Agnès’ world, she is outside of and therefore absent from it. There may be a few emotionally-loaded slower sections that could be off-putting longueurs for smaller children – hopefully the vibrancy of the images keeps them distracted, even if they’re secretly wishing for those funny frog guys to come back. Sirocco is structured like a children’s book, as a young person’s guide to grownup emotions. Yet it may well be grownups – who can use the story to look back at times in their lives when the word “awe” wasn’t preceded by “shock and” – who will take most from it.
This article appears in August 16 • 2024.
