Mio in the Land of Faraway

Starts out OK, but once the protagonist arrives in the magical land of everything he ever wished for, the plot feels over. The main bit of the film is an unexplained and largely unmotivated (they have motivation, but so does everyone else, including all the adults) self-appointed quest of two boys

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to kill an evil knight, which feels unconnected to the boy's journey so far. The quest itself is also rather dull, as it mostly consists of walking and hiding and walking and hiding. On three blessedly dialogue-filled occasions they meet kind and mysterious adults who give them magic objects to aid them (suitably fairytale like), but also advice that never really comes in handy. Especially annoying is when one of them insists never to trust anyone they meet, even though for the entire duration of the film, every single person is exactly who they appear to be. The confrontation with the evil knight (by the way one of the few actors in the film who isn't wooden, as is the mean aunt in the beginning) is the movie's highlight, and has some nice dialogue (in a vacuum at least, though again, not anything that resonates with anything that has happened previously on the film), but afterwards, no lessons seem learned and no arc has been finished, the boy simply returns to the happy land of everything he wished for, much as he did early in the film.
But the film does have one very redeeming quality: the locations. In an era where every greenscreen film can look like whatever it wishes, it's truly beautiful seeing these ancient palaces, fortifications, gardens and mountain sides. While it doesn't warrant the long, boring stretches of walking and running through them with virtually no plot, they do help a lot make it less of a bother sitting through it. The score, too, is often rather nice. But as movie adaptations of Lindgren's fantasy novels goes, this unfortunately doesn't hold a candle to neither Brothers Lionheart nor Ronia Robber's Daughter.

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