I have very mix fillings about this movie. For those who don't know it was base upon "Tytus, Romek and A'tomek" – a extremely popular comic book series – if you grow up in Poland in the 90's like I did, odds are your parents where the generation that grew up reading adventures of this trio and had a huge nostalgic feelings for it. The plot of the movie doesn't fallow any of the books and tries to create it's own story
Unfortunately movie feels for two reason :
1) In the books the main characters where a team of boy scouts, and a lot of humor came out of chemistry between the three main characters – Tytus was the zany and wild chimp who love to do nothing but goof around, Romek was tall, skinny rude-dude who love to tease Tytus (leading to many morale fights between them), while A'tomek was the obese, nerdy, but somehow skilled leader. While Tytus is more-or-less like in the comics, A'tomek characteristics are strongly tone down (his leader skills are completely ignored) while Romek personality trades don't' appears at all. Heck! The scriptwriters appears to take every chance to remove them from the story for a while and leave Tytus go solo, to the point It makes you wonder what their names are doing in the title. In fact Saligia – the main villain – takes most of the screen time and he's not even the character from the comics.
2) The movie is targeted for kids and I mean really young kids. All the morals are deliver in incredibly pandering fashion and 80% of the jokes are very simple and will only amuse audience under the age of 10. Now, Therese nothing wrong with this except the fact that most of Tytus fans where adults at the point this movies was made, and to be honest they will most likely bored by it
if not annoyed.
In other words – if your Tytus fan you will be disappointed. Not only you won't get your characters the way you remember them but won't get the same cleverness in the movies humor.
On other hands I had a lot of sympathy for this movie. While creators try squish way to many messages into it I actually think it works pretty well as a kids movie. I think the story between the main villain Salgia and his friend Oliviero is actually a cute one. I don't wont to give away, but some character goes through some hearth changes by the course of the movie and it's actually done with a very plausible way and with lot's of hearth . It also nice to see a hand drawn movie (at the point it was made all the movies where getting CGI) for which I respect it as a animator, and as a Poll living in the city of Warsaw I respect the backgrounds – the first 20 minutes of the film take place in Warsaw and all locations are the actual ones. The music is fantastic and there is a certain dose of psychedelic atmosphere that I actually dig.
So yhe – while it's far from a good adaptation of the Tytus books it's actually pretty fun animated film for kids... I just wish it woudn't pander to them sow much and give the kids some credit ;)
