Movie reviews: 'Goldbeak' (2021), 'Dalia and the Red Book' (2024)

Goldbeak (trailer) is a 90-minute 3D animated kids film. Although it came out in China in 2021 (original title: 老鹰抓小鸡), it's taken an unusually long time to get distributed, sometimes pretending that its year of release is more recent. It was produced by Liang Zi Film and Nigel W. Tierney, directed by Tierney and Dong Long, and written by Robert N. Skir, Jeff Sloniker, and Vivian Yoon.

In a world of mildly anthropomorphized birds, Goldbeak is an orphaned eagle who's raised by chickens in a rural village. He wants to fly, but most of the villagers don't help. They treat him as an outsider and eventually kick him out. Accompanied by his adoptive sister Ratchet (a gadgeteer genius), he makes the journey to the capital, the creatively-named Avian City.

Along the way he finds a mentor hermit who teaches him to fly. It turns out that Goldbeak is the long-lost nephew of the city's mayor. Then he wants to join the Eagle Scouts, an elite flying squad, but their leading member hates his guts. The mayor turns out to have sinister plans...

Uughhh. This film has set a new low for me. It's not boring, it's not bad, it's just so... horribly average. Nothing's unpredictable. You can see most of the plot points coming from miles away. Even if you're a fan of birds of prey, the story simply isn't rewarding. It's like it was designed by committee.

Still, the animation is fine, as are the many bird designs. There's a weird irony that birds are operating large, technologically advanced aircraft. And I couldn't help but notice that they built their capital city in a location devoid of convenient natural resources.

The reason behind the final conflict has all the subtlety of a Captain Planet episode. The ending battle takes place at night, so it's hard to tell what's going on. The antagonist gets two solid minutes to blubber about how he didn't have a choice. (Screw you, you were willfully evil!) Don't bother with this film. I have no idea what the quality of the English dub is; the copy I watched was in Turkish with English subtitles.

So on to our next feature!

Dalia and the Red Book (trailer) is a 3D animated kids film that came out in Argentina in 2024 (Dalia y el libro rojo). It was written and directed by David Bisbano, and produced by Vista Sur Films and Mi Perro Producciones. It's done in a combination of animation styles, the most obvious ones being computer animation and stop-motion.

Dalia is a girl who wants to become a popular author like her father, who passed away some time ago. Unfortunately she suffers from writer's block. On her 12th birthday, she finds her father's last unfinished novel, a manuscript written in a red book. Cloaked supernatural creatures also want it, and Dalia finds herself captured and taken into the world of the book, while carrying the actual book with her.

Inside, the world is a sparsely populated, multi-tiered city. There's some kind of time limit before things cease to exist. The characters either want to escape the book, or want Dalia to finish it so that the story won't be stuck anymore. Most of the few characters we meet have their own agendas. Dalia has a guardian there, a cloaked, goggled anthropomorphic goat. Her father had written him into the book as a gift on Dalia's 5th birthday. It was this character who first caught my attention, and was why I tracked down this film. Alas, he's one-dimensional, if very cool-looking!

Other anthro characters include a portly owl, several harpies, and a daring she-wolf antagonist with two swords. Her design is extremely tall and thin - I wasn't sure what species of canine she was, until the subtitles mentioned it. (Apparently she was based on Dalia's mother, so maybe Dalia's father was a closet furry?)

The film is a little over 90 minutes long, and like the she-wolf, it feels thin and stretched. There's not enough story to fill it, so the pace is slow, and many things are left unexplained. Like... the rules of the universe, the she-wolf's motivations, things like that. It's too bad, because unlike Goldbeak, this really feels like the creators put their artistic hearts into it. But it needed more.

Ultimately, it's a story about Dalia finding her self-confidence to write, overcoming her creative block. My favorite scene was a short one about an hour into it. Dalia and the goat briefly meet a creature whose author never fully developed it, so it keeps changing forms. Artistically it was neat to watch, if fleeting. The best part of this film to me was its atmosphere. The city really feels other-worldly, they nailed that! Otherwise I'm not sure I can recommend it, except to the curious. The copy I watched was in Spanish with English subtitles, but there may be an English dub? In the U.S. it may be available through Amazon or Apple TV.