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The English edition of this Spanish children’s film about a spider detective is a mystery comedy indebted to Agatha Christie and her swaggering epics.
By Marais Calum
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“Inspector Sun,” a computer-animated family film released in Spain last year and now available in an English-dubbed version, is obviously the product of director Julio Soto Gurpide and the screenwriter’s deep affection for the history of cinema. The film is based on a variety of classics, from silent adventure series to quirky mysteries like “The Thin Man” and the swaggering epics of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn.
Largely set on a flight from Shanghai to San Francisco in the 1930s, this comic crime novel is animated by another outstanding traveling crime novel from the same decade, Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express. “
Inspector Poirot’s version in this story, however, is a spider hunter, and his cheesy studies take place in a colorful and captivating world populated by a multitude of ants, flies, and other insects, plus a locust crime lord and a black widow spider woman. Fatale. . Actor Ronny Chieng plays Inspector Sun, the arachnid detective. It’s oddly suited to the inspector, who sports a thin headache and looks as if he had to look French or Belgian, but Chieng brings a simple playfulness to the film.
The humor alternates between silly but sympathetic puns (“I’m not a praying guy. . . this is it,” Sun jokes at one point) and some pretty juvenile visual jokes, most of them scatological (and none of them are funny). .
But while frustrating at times, the film is still engaging, with nice detail, right down to its final Art Deco titles. Hopefully, they’ll make a sequel and just adapt a Christie tale, maybe “The Spider’s Web. “
SunRated PG Inspector for a slight hint. Duration: 1 hour and 28 minutes. In cinemas.
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