In the very first scene of this film, a woman (well, a female bunny rabbit), broom in hand, sings happily as she sweeps the kitchen floor. Welcome to the wholesome 1950s nostalgia of the Sylvanian Families brand. And while other adaptations of toy franchises whack the audience over the head with irony, skateboards and smart alec gags, this film based on the fuzzy woodland creatures stays firmly on-message. It’s very sweet, slightly dull, and such a throwback that if you stumbled across it on a streaming platform you’d be forgiven for thinking it was made in the 1970s.
It’s set in the bucolically blissful land of Sylvania (though one character pronounces it “Syl-van-ia” so perhaps we’ve all been saying it wrong for years), where bunny Freya is on a mission. It’s her mum’s birthday and Freya wants to give her the perfect present. Each of the film’s chapters takes Freya on a little adventure: first she gets carried off in an autumnal gust while picking flowers to decorate a hat, then she attempts to make her mum a trumpet. The basic animation struggles to get across the highs and low of Freya’s odyssey – it’s such a faithful adaptation the characters look identical to the figures with black bead eyes, and blank faces.
Everything is in fact much less adorable than it should be. And even with a cake-baking dad, it’s riddled with gender cliches (the mums all wear pinnies). I can think of a half a dozen shows for under-sixes that do kind gentle and delightful with more fun and whimsy, though it would probably work best for very young children who feel scared by the suspense in most movies. The slo-oo-ow, gentle voice-acting may also have a Temazepam-like effect on parents in need of a 60-minute shut-eye.
Source: theguardian.com
