April and the Extraordinary World shares so much DNA with better-known properties that watching it can turn into a game of trivia. Doesn’t this plucky heroine remind you a lot of Lyra Belacqua of the His Dark Materials trilogy? Doesn’t that punk she hangs with remind you of Tintin? Wait, isn’t that walking house straight out of a Miyazaki movie? And what’s all this Journey to the Center of the Earth stuff?
And it would be a real shame if April and the Extraordinary World didn’t transcend its influences, but this 2015 French-Belgian-Canadian animated movie does, magnificently. It’s the story of an orphan named April Franklin living in an alternate, steampunky take on Paris in 1931 where electricity has never been harnessed. All of the top scientific minds of the past 60 years have mysteriously gone missing, including April’s parents. Her life-long mission to crack their top-secret serum for invulnerability leads her down a dangerous path of intrigue, pursued by government operatives and her own family’s legacy alike. Along the way she encounters super-intelligent talking animals, double-crosses, explosions, high-flying technological marvels, and enemies who will stop at nothing in their pursuit of world domination. All of it is underscored by the film’s gorgeously muted color palette and consistently fluid animation put together by more than a dozen credited production companies. Some of the voices behind include names like J.K. Simmons, Paul Giamatti, Susan Sarandon, and the Canadian actress Angela Galuppo, who gives April the gravitas and spunk that her lonely, driven character merits.
That loneliness really matters. It may be a two-hour science-fantasy action film filled with derring-do and a snarky cat, but at its heart, April and the Extraordinary World is a movie about self-actualizing in the face of despair and finding your family in unexpected places. It reportedly made just shy of $500,000 at the box office against a budget of around $11,000,000, which is a shame. It’s on Netflix and available to stream for the foreseeable future, so don’t skip it.
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