The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily

There is famine in the Sicilian mountains and the bears are hungry. Leonzio, the bear king, has another trouble: his son Tonio was taken by hunters years ago. The bears come down and take the city of men. Then they stay. And as time passes they begin to learn how men live. Lorenzo Mattotti directs, from the children's book Dino Buzzati published in 1945. Mattotti is not really a director but a draughtsman, a known name in Italian comics and illustration, and the visual language comes straight from his hand: flat fields of colour, hard edges, and a design that uses layers instead of depth. It looks nothing like three dimensional animation. The subject is not the victory but what follows it. The bears win and what they win corrupts them; Buzzati's book begins like a fable for children and arrives at an account of how power rots. It screened in Un Certain Regard at the 2019 Cannes film festival. The narrative is framed through a storyteller and a girl, and that line is the weakest thing in the film, interrupting the main story again and again. Who it is for: viewers who like hand drawn animation and Italian literary adaptation. Who it is not for: too dark for small children and too simple in its telling for adults, the film sits between the two.