Lavish, loving hand-drawn animation marks “Long Way North,” from animator Rémi Chayé, who was an assistant director on the much-admired “The Secret of Kells.” In the nineteenth century, Sasha, a young Russian girl dreams of traveling from her St. Petersburg home among the aristocracy to the arctic to find her explorer grandfather and his lost ship. A grand adventure told on an intimate scale, with an exemplary heroine, illustrated in slabs and slashes of color with dynamic simplicity, Chayé’s feature debut is a memorable journey. Jonathan Morali’s pop-folk score is one of the film’s many inspired esthetic choices. 81m. (Ray Pride)
“Long Way North” opens Friday, December 16 at Siskel for two weeks in both its French language original version and English translation.
