I really enjoyed this film, I'm way older than its intended audience but the aunt Isa in the film is living my witchy cabin in the forest dream so it drew me in!
The clunky dubbed English version on Amazon does this film no favours and it isn't fair that reviews here are clearly not taking that into consideration. The English dubbing is pretty bad thanks to over zealous voice acting so I quickly switched to subtitles and it was so much better. Even though the only option for subtitles I had was also audio description which was mildly annoying when you don't need to be told there are 'birds cawing' or 'ominous music'.
It's a family film so it does have a simple plot which I'm all for, why over complicate things and make things convoluted? So many big hoohah mainstream Hollywood films would benefit from simplifying and shortening these days. But the direction here was really good. There's a scene that uses CGI that is shown as a reflection in the main character's eye. This is genius! I wish more filmmakers would use CGI cleverly in this way, so it doesn't just look like average clunky CGI effects that will age badly, it was considered and made the most of the special effects, as did some of the other scenes.
I appreciated the sinister but not violent aspect too which is creeping in more for younger viewers, and I loved the message of the wild witches, protecting the wild, the earth etc. Overall I think this is an enjoyable, quirky, wholesome watch with a positive message about embracing your weird and protecting the natural world.
