Reviews

The movie's good intention, lovely scenary and well selected main actress gets shattered unfortunately by irrelevant comments, lousy speaking styles, missing episodes and by being rude,little modest and badly behaved. Normally, the story is coherent, the episodes are well explained and contain reasons and motivation for the persons' reactions, mostly missing in the film. Actually, the little witch manages to hide her magic powers in front of human beings by smart hints and allusions about what happens next, but not in the movie. People seem to behave rather rude and egoistic. The way words are pronounced often seem rather spit out as in colloquial language which weakens the magical fairytale atmosphere. One might wonder at what time the fairytale plays. The village seems a medieval one, the children are dressed as in the 50s. The girl wears her hair loose, rather uncommon for the intented time, i'd say. Even though, the little witches house is nice and funnily decorated, i wonder if the scene-painters got confused with Pippi Longstocking (by Astrid Lindgren). Some decoration and household appliances get in focus and make you wonder why the tea pot seems arabian, why the raven sleeps in a hanging bed (ridiculous), why the little witch takes a bath without taking of her clothes and letting hang out her feet: i don't consider such details as magical or wondrous but ridiculous and childish. The raven is presented as warm hearted and benevolent but also ageing and cowardly. The other witches are disappointing and utterly absurd - they might seem too weird and scary, but also lousy and dumb. Some of the added episodes are nice, make allusions to other fairytales, but particularly the end is too long, too incoherent, too exaggerated, unnecessary - to sum up: boring and previsible.