The Pout-Pout Fish review – Nick Offerman is best thing in kids cartoon adventure on the high seas

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Offerman leads a talented cast, but this preschool picture book spinoff fails to inspire Grumpy Mr Fish (Nick Offerman) has a reputation for being a sourpuss, but when he teams up with baby sea dragon Pip (Nina Oyama) to locate a wish-granting fish, it’s pretty much guaranteed that we will discover some sort of heart of gold lurking beneath his gloomy exterior. Not that a picture book for the two to four-year-old crowd can’t be expanded into a satisfying narrative feature film universe, but this high seas adventure as personal growth is fairly by-the-numbers stuff. Based on the books by Deborah Diesen and Dan Hanna, The Pout-Pout Fish’s animation lacks the charm of the books’ illustrations, and the writing is uninspired. Sample exposition-dump: “Did you not hear what they just said? Someone else is looking for Shimmer! And they’ve got a head start! If they get to her first, she won’t have any wish power left!” When the script tries to be more distinctive, you kind of wish they hadn’t...
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Saint Omer director Alice Diop: ‘I make films from the margins because that’s my territory, my history’

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Raised in a Paris banlieue, the documentary-maker is now in the spotlight thanks to her Venice prize-winning first feature, based on the true story of a woman accused of killing her baby

“I have a voice that doesn’t carry very well,” says French film-maker Alice Diop, when I tell her I can’t quite hear what she’s saying. We meet in a cafe near her home in the working-class district of Montreuil, on the eastern edge of Paris. It is busy with lunch parties, and the combination of Diop’s French – she speaks fast and quietly – with the occasional crashes of crockery isn’t ideal for discussing the complex, challenging new film she has made.

Still, if Diop’s speech doesn’t carry acoustically, it’s a different matter with her artistic voice. After a significant career as a documentary-maker, Diop’s feature film debut, Saint Omer, is resonating worldwide. It won two awards at the Venice film festival last year and was France’s entry for the best international feature at the Academy Awards, making Diop the first black woman ever to represent France in the Oscar race. Diop is suddenly in the spotlight in a way she never imagined.

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