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Storm boy 1976 cast3/25/2023 MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements, mild peril and brief languageĬast: Finn Little, Jai Courtney, Geoffrey Rush, Morgana Davies, Trevor JamiesonĬredits:Directed by Shawn Seet, script by Justin Monjo, based on the Colin Thiele. “Sometimes you forget the best thing you ever learned.” There are real birds in these scenes, and the movie, slight as it is, is richer for it.įor old men remembering the magic of childhood and filmmakers caught up in the cinema’s digital revolution, that right there is the lesson in “Storm Boy.” There’s a warmth to these DIY, making it up as they go scenes - Dad donating a scarf to keep them warm, Mike, whom Fingerbone gives the Aboriginal name “Storm Boy,” improvising a fish guts food processor with an outboard motor.Īnd there’s a single line that has more heart in it than the entire screenplay of “Dumbo” manages, a little boy’s whispered “ please don’t die” to a living thing (three of them) he has in his care.Īustralians reviewing this seem to have a little of that “doesn’t measure up to the original film” thing going, and as I have been beating up on “Dumbo” this AM, I feel their pain.īut as someone who hasn’t seen the 1976 “Storm Boy,” I can endorse this movie’s occasional flash of emotion, the clever if slightly sterile way the past and present (Rush’s character revisiting his tweenage self) are blended and the Big Action Payoff, which is both far-fetched and analog tactile. For thousands of years, just black fellas.”Īfter a bit of pre-integration wariness between Dad and Fingerbone, the men pitch in to help save the pelicans. “When a pelican is killed, there’ll always be a storm.” As he and the boy debate caring for the chicks, he delivers a shorthand history lesson about this land. The aboriginal man Fingerbone ( Trevor Jamieson of “Rabbit-Proof Fence”) figures they’re goners. After one such massacre, Mike finds three orphaned chicks. Not the beer-swilling jerks who wander in and shoot up the place from time to time, that’s for sure. ![]() But there’s a tug of war over this remote piece of land, a local battle between hunters and those who want to declare the place “a sanctuary…” his father tells Mike. It’s the 1950s, and Mike’s life is wading in the shallows and wandering among the placid flocks of white pelicans. There was a tragedy that turned Dad into a hermit-like waterman, home-schooling his son, raising him on fish and whatever else he could scrounge up. That’s where young Mike (Finn Little) and his father, whom the locals nicknamed “Hideaway Tom” (Courtney) moved. It was called “Ninety Mile Beach” outside of Adelaide. Let’s take a walk on the beach and remember “the beach I grew up on.” So let Maddie be late for school and the board meeting can wait. A storm and a taste of candy from his childhood put him in mind of a flashback. It’s up to grandpa to smooth troubled waters. She’s gone into “I HATE him” mode over the whole cynical “ruin the waterways and destroy their original homelands” debacle. Son Malcolm ( Erik Thomson) has upset his teen daughter ( Morgana Davies) with this decision. Rush plays a retired tycoon who has been summoned home to help his son see to a transfer of traditional farm (natural) land into hands that will develop it. When you’re making a movie about children and animals, “Fly Away Home” is your template, not “Jurassic World.” “Dumbo” director Tim Burton learned that the hard way. The actors seem as tickled by these birds as we’re meant to be. As we watch Finn Little and Jai Courtney (playing his father, and playing him well) interact with naked, featherless chicks and adult white pelicans, the difference between what digital critters don’t give you and the surprise and delight real ones do is a pleasant shock to the system. It was jarring seeing “Storm Boy” on the morning after sitting through Disney’s live-action (CGI assisted) “Dumbo” remake. ![]() ![]() It’s not a thrill-a-minute piece of children’s entertainment, but winning performances by young Finn Little, by Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush as the adult “boy,” and by Trevor Jamieson and Morgana Davies, lift it.Īs do the birds. ![]() The new film is structured as a long flashback, a story remembered by the old man who lived it, its lessons worth passing on to a new generation. A beloved Australian tale about a boy, his pelican and preserving and respecting nature earns a sympathetic new telling in “Storm Boy,” which could be called a remake, a reboot and a sequel all at once.Ĭolin Thiele’s novel was most famously filmed in 1976, but has turned up in animated form as well.
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