Eleanor’s Secret
ACMI, 28/09/2010
Status: Behind by 6 films
The grist and substance of Eleanor’s Secret (both the film and the actual secret) is fairy-tales.
Nat’s great aunt Eleanor dies and leaves his parents the house and him a vast library of fairy-tales. But Nat can’t yet read and selling the books will help pay for the upkeep on the house, so they are dragged off to a dastardly local antiques dealer. But these are no ordinary books and Nat must recover them to save all stories everywhere from being lost forever. Although it has glimpses of something fun or poignant, it’s a mostly ho-hum plot that plods through with heavy-handed direction.
Most kids movies these days have something for grown-ups too, but Eleanor’s Secret felt more like the old animation adaptations of Alice in Wonderland than, say, Shrek, which uses hip irony and self-reflexiveness to warp the fairy tales it relies on. Eleanor’s Secret is played straight as Nat’s quest becomes a kind of fairy-tale in itself. That and the 2D animation made me come over all nostalgic for the animated fairy-tales of my childhood. So maybe there was something in it for the grown-ups, after all.
