Posts Tagged ‘CoolCanucks Blog Contest ~ MIA AND THE MIGOO DVD Review & Giveaway’

CoolCanucks Review of MIA AND THE MIGOO DVD!!

Thursday, August 30th, 2012

 

 

 

 

What’s the story?

Mia (voiced by Amanda Mis­quez) hasn’t heard from her father, Pedro (Jesse Corti), in a long time and has a vision that she should go look for him. He’s actu­ally trapped in an under­ground tun­nel at his work site, which is run by a lux­ury real-estate devel­op­ment firm headed by Mr. Jekhide (John DiMag­gio), who must take his own young son, Aldrin (Vin­cent Agnello), to a trop­i­cal island where he plans to build an exclu­sive vaca­tion club. Aid­ing Mia on her trip to the remote island are her dead mother’s good luck charms, a sor­cer­ess (Whoopi Gold­berg), and even­tu­ally by the Migoo, a shape-shifting, marshmallow-like crea­ture (Wal­lace Shawn) that can mul­ti­ply into var­i­ous ver­sions of itself and whose job it is to pro­tect the Tree of Life, a spe­cial “mother tree” that resides in the mid­dle of the pro­posed devel­op­ment. Aldrin and Mia band together to both attempt to find Pedro and to try to stop Jekhide from destroy­ing the tree.

 

 

 

 

 

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

 

From the dis­trib­u­tors of the Acad­emy Award®-nominated The Secret of Kells, comes MIA AND THE MIGOO, the gor­geous sec­ond fea­ture from renowned French ani­ma­tor Jacques-Rémy Gir­erd.  A fable-like jour­ney of a young girl who must over­come her fears on a quest to find her father and save the world from destruc­tion, MIA AND THE MIGOO was cre­ated from an astound­ing 500,000 hand-painted frames of ani­ma­tion.  A stun­ning work of art, breath­tak­ing to behold, with back­grounds that invoke Van Gogh, Monet, and Cezanne, it also fea­tures the voices of Whoopi Gold­berg, Matthew Modine, James Woods and Wal­lace Shawn.

 

Fol­low­ing a pre­mo­ni­tion, Mia sets out on a cross con­ti­nen­tal jour­ney, though moun­tains and jun­gles in search of her father, who has been trapped in a land­slide at a con­struc­tion site on a remote trop­i­cal lake.  In the mid­dle of the lake stands the ancient Tree of Life, watched over by inno­cent, bum­bling for­est spir­its called the Migoo, who grow and change shape as they please, mor­ph­ing from small child­like beings to petu­lant giants.  The Migoo have been dis­rupt­ing the con­struc­tion to pro­tect this sacred site – and now together with Mia they join in a fight to find Mia’s father and save the Tree, with the future of life on Earth hang­ing in the balance.

Mia and the Migoo isn’t just beau­ti­ful to look at it, its an enter­tain­ing and thought­ful story. I hes­i­tate in using the word, as peo­ple have the impres­sion a movie can’t say any­thing of sub­stance with­out being preachy, but it also con­tains some nice mes­sages about respect: self-respect, respect for oth­ers, and respect for the world around you. While some might bri­dle at the rather sub­ver­sive idea that the envi­ron­ment and car­ing for those around you is more impor­tant than turn­ing a profit, con­sid­er­ing how so much pop­u­lar enter­tain­ment aimed at chil­dren these days cel­e­brates con­sumerism it makes for a refresh­ing change. The only prob­lem is the mes­sage is so sub­tle it will prob­a­bly be lost on most of its audi­ence. While Gir­erd and com­pany are to be com­mended for cre­at­ing some­thing which doesn’t assume its audi­ence is stu­pid, when peo­ple are used to being blud­geoned over the head they might not respond to a gen­tle tap on the shoulder.

 

 

 

 

The story is a com­bi­na­tion of a clas­sic road trip and adven­ture as young Mia leaves her vil­lage to look for her father, Pedro. He has taken a job far from home on a con­struc­tion site build­ing a resort in a remote wilder­ness area. Strange acci­dents have been hap­pen­ing on the site, cranes have fallen over and there have been land slides. When Pedro hears an odd noise in one of the tun­nels they are build­ing on the site he goes to inves­ti­gate and is trapped by a cave in. Hun­dreds of miles away Mia wakes up from a dream of her father in trou­ble. With her mother already dead, she’s not pre­pared to lose her father and after vis­it­ing her mother’s grave heads out to find him.

Aldrin lives in a world so com­pletely dif­fer­ent from Mia it might as well be on another planet. His mother and father are divorced and his father, Jekhide, the busi­ness­man behind the devel­op­ment project Pedro was work­ing at, is a worka­holic who ignores him. His mother is a sci­en­tist study­ing the effects of global warm­ing on the Antarc­tic ice-cap, so in some ways Aldrin spends the film in much the same way as Mia, look­ing for his father. For even though he ends up trav­el­ling with Jekhide to the con­struc­tion site to inves­ti­gate the mys­te­ri­ous acci­dents, they might as well be hun­dreds of miles apart even when they’re in the same room. In so many ways Aldrin is the par­ent in their rela­tion­ship as he’s always hav­ing to take his father to task for his self-centred and self­ish behaviour.

 

CAST

 

·         John DiMag­gio (Trans­form­ers: Dark of the Moon, Lit­tle Fock­ers, Bee Movie)

·         Whoopi Gold­berg (Ghost, For Col­ored Girls, Sis­ter Act)

·         Matthew Modine (Full Metal Jacket, Mar­ried to the Mob, Cut­throat Island)

·         Wal­lace Shawn (Toys Story 1, 2, 3, The Incred­i­bles, Mon­sters, Inc.)

·         James Woods (Once Upon a Time in Amer­ica, The Vir­gin Sui­cides, Casino )

 

BONUS FEATURES

 

·         “Mak­ing of” Featurette

·         Inter­view with the Director

 

PROGRAM INFORMATION

 

Type: DVD

Cat­a­log #:  EOE-DV-7081

Run­ning Time: 91 mins. + extras

Genre:  Ani­ma­tion

Rated:  PG

Aspect Ratio: 16 x 9/1.78:1

Audio: 5.1 Dolby Digital

Lan­guage: Eng­lish w/English SDH Subtitles

 

For the lat­est break­ing news on MIA AND THE MIGOO and other releases, fol­low Enter­tain­ment One on Twit­ter: http://twitter.com/eOneHomeVideo

 

 

 

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