It's 1910. Emile (Sebastien Desjours) is a shy film projectionist who loves cinema and especially his stunning colleague Maud (Ludivine Sagnier). He works with Raoul (Gad Elmaleh), a delivery driver and inventor on bad terms with Lucille (Vanessa Paradis), his childhood friend and now a cabaret singer whose aunt Carlotta (Julie Ferrier) wishes to marry off to local police commissioner and mayoral candidate Victor Maynott (Francois Cluzot). One evening Ralph brings Emile to the Paris Botanic Gardens to deliver something but in the process they stumble upon a closed greenhouse where Raoul accidentally awakens a peculiar monster and once it inevitably escapes, they elect to track it down. Now, once Lucille also becomes entangled in this fiasco, they realise the monster might be more harmless than it appears and so now they have to set out to retrieve it before it falls into the corrupt Maynott's hands.
This effort by French animator and director Bibo Bergeron, based loosely on Gaston Leroux's novel The Phantom of the Opera, is quite narratively thin, but what it lacks in plot originality it compensates for in energy, fun and visual beauty. It's appropriately loaded with action and visual effects and it's also willing to affectionately poke fun at our rather bumbling, impulsive heroes. The animation itself has an unusual quasi-stop-motion, quasi-CGI vibe which is nonetheless cohesive and it's populated with characters who are all voiced with charisma and collective chemistry.
Again the narrative is sometimes cliched, and I would've liked a more prominent score, but while A Monster in Paris isn't an animation gem, it's nonetheless an enjoyable way to relax for 90 minutes.
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