Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Streams is a captivating adventure that will appeal to both children and adults who believe in the limitless possibilities of animation. The movie is a tender story of love and loss wrapped in an incredibly imaginative psychedelic adventure that feels like a game of hopscotch between worlds.
A Game of Hopscotch Between Worlds
The story begins with renowned children’s author Agnès pulling an all-nighter to write a story. She forgets that she’s supposed to take care of her friend’s two little girls, Carmen and Juliette. Agnès urges the girls to read a book while she takes a nap. Juliette finds a little wooden toy that falls from the book’s pages. The toy draws a hopscotch grid on the floor, and Juliette follows it, leading her and Carmen to the Kingdom of Air Streams.
The mystic hopscotch can trigger transformations, and both sisters arrive on the other side in cute half-human cat form. The Kingdom is a pretty inclusive place, ruled by a fat, ugly mayor who is besotted with the singer Selma, an imperious duck with the voice and grace of an enchanted Nina Simone.
The Quest to Return Home
The mayor punishes Juliette by making her work for Selma as a maid and sentences Carmen to marry his idiot son. The wooden toy breaks after attempting a hopscotch jailbreak, and the girls are stuck in the Kingdom of Air Streams. Selma offers to help Juliette prevent her sister’s marriage and reveals that she is Agnès’s sister. After her untimely death in a storm, Agnès reimagined Selma as a restless adventuress, keeping her memory alive in the fantasy of her fiction.
Like all good children’s adventure stories, the quest is bracketed by the need to get home. Chieux piles on a genuine sense of peril that’s genuinely edge-of-the-sea thrilling as opposed to scary. The wizard alone has the power to return the children safely to the human world. In finding him, Selma discovers a surprising truth about Sirocco, whose relationship with the wind creature is not what it might appear.
A Unique and Effortlessly Surprising Adventure
Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Streams is a unique and effortlessly surprising adventure that shows that animation still has infinite possibilities. The movie is a palate-cleanser that reminds us that there is still room for magic and imagination in storytelling. Will there be a sequel? The events within the film suggest that Selma has led a storied life, with many more such exploits behind her, making the idea of her returning for more female-fronted sagas a pretty enticing one. After all, adventure is like riding a bike – you never forget.