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Words of wisdom: "You don’t need wings to be free! There’s another world with a blue sun and so much sap you can swim in it!" Maybe it sounds better in the French version (there are dual casts) of this animation fantasy from Chris Delaporte and Pascal Pinon. Kaena (Kirsten Dunst in the English-language version) is a teenage girl whose freethinking vexes Opaz (Richard Harris), the high priest of her village, which is nestled in the branches of Axis, a giant free-floating tree somewhere in the universe. Opaz urges his flock to continue to offer the bulk of their life-giving sap harvest to the "gods," who are really Selenites, parasitic monsters dwelling deep in the roots. Sounds a lot like A Bug’s Life, though the filmmakers’ obsession with Kaena’s sexy CGI butt confirms that they’re from France, not Disney. Also, they don’t shy away from ambitious, sometimes disturbing imagery. The Selenites, for example, suggest the alien from Predator as drawn by Giacometti, and many of the oppressive settings look like Star Wars storyboards as rendered by Francis Bacon. But then there’s the story and the dialogue and the cockeyed, corny cosmology. Maybe that’s what Kaena means by swimming in sap. (91 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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