‘Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Streams’ Review: This ‘Yellow Submarine’-Like French Toon Is a Trip

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It’s Juliette’s fifth birthday, and she can wish for whatever she wants. Top of her list is an adventure, the likes of which this restless girl has only read about in books — specifically, a series of fantasy novels published by a family friend, about a capricious wizard who controls the wind.

In “Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Streams,” a quiet afternoon takes an unpredictable, eye-popping turn, as Juliette (voiced by Loïse Charpentier) and her 8-year-old sister Carmen (Maryne Bertieaux) are whisked away to a dazzling surreal world of alligator-shaped airships and bird-headed opera divas, where seemingly anything can happen.

Welcome to the imagination of French director Benoît Chieux, who has crafted — in the year 2023, against considerable odds — a truly spectacular psychedelic excursion in the vein of head-trip classics “The Fantastic Planet” and “The Yellow Submarine.” It’s been roughly half a century since those two movies demonstrated just how liberating the medium of animation can be, but you wouldn’t know it to watch Chieux’s hand-drawn curio, which takes the mesmerizing dream logic of such projects and applies is to an “Alice in Wonderland”-style plot.

But will kids go for it? My feeling says that even though Chieux and co-writer Alain Gagnol (“A Cat In Paris”) have designed the experience with younger viewers in mind, it’s the oddity-seeking art-house crowd that will most appreciate the film, which looks as if it was crafted decades ago in a flurry of creative (possibly drug-enhanced) inspiration and then lost to time, à la “Son of the White Mare” or Luigi Serafini’s brain-bending “Codex Seraphinianus” (which isn’t animated, but oughta be).