Ten-year-old cartographer T.S. Spivet secretly leaves his family's ranch in Montana where he lives with his cowboy father and scientist mother and travels across the country aboard a freight train to receive an award at the Smithsonian Institute. But no one there suspects that the lucky winner is a ten-year-old child with a very dark secret...
Even at its zippiest ... The Young And Prodigious T.S. Spivet is infused with a pervasive sense of melancholy and loss, with a family that seems as damaged as they are lovably quirky.
It should have been Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Hugo, a 3-D art film to impress critics and families during holiday/awards season. Instead, it may be his Idiocracy.
The quirky charm, visual wit and melancholy undertow of Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet translate joyously to the screen in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spite.
Jeunet never finds a matching aesthetic, shooting in an over-saturated 3D palette and doubling down on forced Americana, although most of the film was shot in BC and Alberta. It just doesn't work.
Globe and Mail
April 10, 2015
Like cross-breeding a chihuahua with a Jack Russell, the result may be doubly cute, but also doubly annoying.
Everything you expect from Jeunet: playful filmmaking, a fanciful story, strange plot twists, delightfully eccentric characters and a lot more seriousness than it appears on the surface.
It's the multilayered 3-D wizardry with a retro feel that gives Young and Prodigious a delirious sense of timelessness, all set in a magic-realist world where ghosts and dogs might suddenly speak.
The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet is the perfect 3D vehicle and Jeunet takes full advantage, offering a feast of amusing visual flourishes suited to the book's playfulness.
