Spring break, as US director Harmony Korine has outlined, may translate into mayhem and ski-masks for many. However, for your average film critic, it means many age-inappropriate movies.
Say hello to Molly Monster, which is about a happy, playful rounded dragon-like creature who sleeps under a hammock-shaped moon beside her best friend Edison, a clockwork mouse. Or possibly cat.
Molly's world – a strange airless planet similar to the kind found in The Clangers or Button Moon – is rocked, in the best possible way, when her monster mama lays an egg, a new addition that will require mama and papa to journey to Egg Island, where monster children are usually not allowed.
The excited Molly is not best pleased to learn she will have to stay at home and wait for her new brother or sister with her buffoonish uncles, Alfredo and Santiago. But when she realises the baby’s knitted hat has been left behind, she sneaks off for Egg Island with a reluctant Edison by her side.
You wait for ages for an allegory to express how a young child feels about a new sibling then The Boss Baby and Molly Monster arrive all at once.
Molly Monster, a star of German pre-school television, makes a welcome transition to the big screen under the watch of her creator Ted Sieger. Taking wacky visual cues from Dr Seuss, Sieger, a Swiss illustrator and director, fashions a colourful, fun world that explains where baby monsters come from for a demographic that may not even be able to articulate how a mammy monster and daddy monster might go about acquiring a baby.
Sweet and silly viewing for the littlest cinema patrons.
