by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $12.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Gemma Arterton, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Colin McFarlane, Hayley Atwell, Lenny Henry
Intro:
… a simple motorsports story boosted by fun animation and creativity with its set pieces.
After park-exclusive games like The Secret of Balthasar Castle and shorts like The Time Carousel, Europa-Park mascots Ed Euromaus and Edda Euromausi are heading for the big screen in celebration of Europa-Park’s 50th anniversary.
As a cinematic ad for the theme park, the plot itself doesn’t really feature it. There is an amusement park, run by lead character Edda’s father, where she is initially shown pining over one day becoming a professional racer, but the celebratory elements are strictly in iconography and the odd recognisable anthropomorphic face. Which can only be a good thing, as rather than being just a bit of self-congratulatory marketing, it has space to work on its own as a racing comedy with talking animals. And it doesn’t do a half-bad job.
The visuals are courtesy of Mack Animation, a studio run by the Europa-Park-owning Mack family, itself a successor to Ambient Entertainment, who worked on the aforementioned animations as well as Monster Family. The race scenes are energetic (even if a bit too close to Mario Kart to keep those thumbs from twitching), the individual tracks show style in presenting Paris, the Swiss alps, Italy, and London, and the more cartoonish traps like a mechanical kraken and a monstrous double-decker bus are as cool-looking and as they are emphatically bizarre.
Scratching a bit under the asphalt, though, reveals a rather bog-standard underdog sports yarn. Revolving around the idealistic younger competitor wanting to make it out of their humdrum upbringing (Gemma Arterton as Edda), and the jaded star athlete who becomes the hero’s reluctant mentor (Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Ed), the script is tropey to the point of, when attempting to subvert the more obvious plot developments (like the intensely obvious rival Nachtkraab, voiced by Colin McFarlane), just falls into other long-running genre tropes. There is little here that will serve as much of a surprise, right down to the colour commentary from Rob Beckett’s Enzo, which would be more annoying if it wasn’t merely relieving that he isn’t appearing in a sequel to Kay Cannon’s Cinderella or some other such nonsense.
All the effort is put into the presentation (save for an odd continuity gaff where one of the racers drives over a competitor, only to be shown still behind them in the very next cut). The sense of humour is pleasant enough, with plenty of animal puns, which land on the right side of listenable because quite a few of them are at least knowingly cheesy, some running gag characters like the park’s crystal-gazing fortune teller, and decent attempts at on-the-track smack talk. Nothing amazing or anything, but given the batting average for talking animal films for kids (anyone remember The Queen’s Corgi? Good.), blessings are counted that none of it is actively painful.
Grand Prix of Europe is a simple motorsports story boosted by fun animation and creativity with its set pieces. The performances work through the more well-trodden aspects of the script with ease, the action brings out just enough video game-adjacent joy without feeling extraneous (especially since the film’s own tie-in Ed & Edda: Grand Prix – Racing Champions is really nothing special), and while the anniversary brief gets a bit lost in the sauce, there’s still a welcome sentiment to it about having these kinds of spaces where kids can just have fun, which fits for both the original park and this film’s own audience.
