Song of the Sea has beautiful visuals throughout and is always a treat to look at. It's an intimate fantasy tale of a family living in the wake of their mother having went into the sea because she's a creature thing to become a creature thing. Now the brother and sister must get back home from their Grandmother's house and also solve the fantasy thing because the girl is a Selkie (half-seal) like her Mom was. This movie didn't really make sense to me.
Watching the movie is a nice experience because the images look like well-crafted, detailed drawings like a painting from a children's book. But beneath these visuals is a story that feels like it makes enough sense to pass off, but I can't figure out why anything really happened. To put it best, this movie made up its own rules as it went along. It's like someone is telling you a bedtime story that they're just making up as they go along. It lacks proper stakes and explanations for why things in its fantasy world are the way they are.
I'm not just trying to nitpick, here. Towards the beginning, I was getting a hint that this story didn't have anything at stake. They want to get home, and separately, the girl is discovering that she is a seal creature. With this discovery, which happens out of nowhere, she has a task. What is this task? She has to un-stone creatures and fairies from this fantasy world that she meets as if she is a chosen one, but she isn't. We don't know why they want her specifically or what she is getting from them by doing this. We don't know what it means for her to be a Selkie. We do know that she is going to die for some reason if she doesn't do it.
So what are her tasks for accomplishing this? The one thing that makes sense is that she has to get a coat from her house, but most of the story is the two siblings wandering wherever in this fantasy world. She has to follow some little shiny things and then she'll solve the fantasy thing. I call it the "fantasy thing" because she's not really solving anything at all. She's just going on a thing that she needs to do because the movie said so. There's a shell that she plays that makes bad things go away when convenient, established by the movie when needed. There's a water portal in a house in the middle of nowhere that leads to a guy whose beard grows and I guess each strand tells a story. I don't know what this guy did for the story or for the characters. There are seals who help the characters ride to where they need to go in the ocean just because.
The pieces in this story add up to what looks like a proper film but they don't actually make any sense, and therefore mean nothing. Unlike other fantasies, this one establishes its rules on the spot and without any grounding. By the end of the movie, I had realized that no explanation was coming for me, and that this movie simply didn't make sense. I can't say, however, that it was unpleasant to watch. The characters, while not that developed, were nice to watch and had loving relationships with one another that gives the movie some emotion. The score, I should mention, is very very good. I had a warm feeling while watching much of it, but it's hard for me not to be weighed down by its lack of making any sort of sense, and I have a hard time believing that apparently no critics see this.
Watching the movie is a nice experience because the images look like well-crafted, detailed drawings like a painting from a children's book. But beneath these visuals is a story that feels like it makes enough sense to pass off, but I can't figure out why anything really happened. To put it best, this movie made up its own rules as it went along. It's like someone is telling you a bedtime story that they're just making up as they go along. It lacks proper stakes and explanations for why things in its fantasy world are the way they are.
I'm not just trying to nitpick, here. Towards the beginning, I was getting a hint that this story didn't have anything at stake. They want to get home, and separately, the girl is discovering that she is a seal creature. With this discovery, which happens out of nowhere, she has a task. What is this task? She has to un-stone creatures and fairies from this fantasy world that she meets as if she is a chosen one, but she isn't. We don't know why they want her specifically or what she is getting from them by doing this. We don't know what it means for her to be a Selkie. We do know that she is going to die for some reason if she doesn't do it.
So what are her tasks for accomplishing this? The one thing that makes sense is that she has to get a coat from her house, but most of the story is the two siblings wandering wherever in this fantasy world. She has to follow some little shiny things and then she'll solve the fantasy thing. I call it the "fantasy thing" because she's not really solving anything at all. She's just going on a thing that she needs to do because the movie said so. There's a shell that she plays that makes bad things go away when convenient, established by the movie when needed. There's a water portal in a house in the middle of nowhere that leads to a guy whose beard grows and I guess each strand tells a story. I don't know what this guy did for the story or for the characters. There are seals who help the characters ride to where they need to go in the ocean just because.
The pieces in this story add up to what looks like a proper film but they don't actually make any sense, and therefore mean nothing. Unlike other fantasies, this one establishes its rules on the spot and without any grounding. By the end of the movie, I had realized that no explanation was coming for me, and that this movie simply didn't make sense. I can't say, however, that it was unpleasant to watch. The characters, while not that developed, were nice to watch and had loving relationships with one another that gives the movie some emotion. The score, I should mention, is very very good. I had a warm feeling while watching much of it, but it's hard for me not to be weighed down by its lack of making any sort of sense, and I have a hard time believing that apparently no critics see this.