The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse opens with a mole mistaking a tree for a cake and never gets any less whimsical than that. It ends with an inverse Jungle Book finale, and the entire script is basically The Little Prince platitudes. Serious eye-roll piece of fluff. This is just desperate to be a movie that gets sentimentally adopted as a holiday classic, but it’s far too saccharine and shallow to earn it.
The picture-book-come-to-life animation is genuinely quite lovely, though, with outstanding use of white space snow sliced by daring shadows, plus beautiful inky skies. The motion is occasionally a bit ungainly — it works better as stills — but my big complaint is the character designs which have these weird sketch-like flourishes that simulate un-erased pencil lines. It’s most distracting on the horse (you can see it in the poster) but there for all of them.
Maybe in the right context — cozied up with your kids on a snow day next to a crackling fire — it might spark magic, but it’s just a bit too much knock-off Winnie the Pooh for me.
