User reviews

Really nice film with lots of good voice acting and the story is a nice one that rattles on nicely. Full of twists and turns and ups and downs.

Hugh Laurie is great, Emilia clarke is the star of the show but all of the vocal work is good

Terry Pratchetts story so obviously discworld plays a part and Death shows up as you would expect. If you enjoy discworld you'll love it and to be fair even if you're not, it's a great film to watch with the kids. I watched it with two 12 year old boys and a 6 year old boy and they all enjoyed it

They all enjoyed it and put it in the 7/8 out of 10

Enjoyed.

This animated film is based on "The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents", which is a wonderful book that is well worth a read.

Look at the quality of the animation, I found it to be generally good and occasional great. The color palette was fairly standard for an animated film, but the attention to detail in each frame was impressive. The character designs were okay, but not particularly unique or memorable. The world building was decent, but it did not offer anything particularly new or interesting.

The voice cast was good, Hugh Laurie is always great, and the whole cast did a decent job of bringing the characters to life. The humour, emotion, and depth were okay, and occasional great.

So, "The Amazing Maurice" is a decent animated film that has its good points, but also some areas for improvement. The animation is okay, the world building is decent, and the voice acting is entertaining. If you're looking for an pretty good animated film that will pass the time, this could be a good option. However, it's not a must-see film that will leave a lasting impression.

Saw this at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

"The Amazing Maurice" is a story that follows Maurice, a goofy streetwise cat, who has the perfect money-making scam. He finds a dumb-looking kid who plays a pipe and has his very own horde of rats, who are strangely literate. I love animated films and I usually like to check out animated films from smaller studios to give them chances. As part of the Sundance Kids selection, while it's cheesy and unspecial, this is probably one of the better children films to show for kids. I have never read the book before but the film does offers some charm and has a decent personality.

The main story is pretty basic and predictable but even it's simple setting, the film does have some fun humor and the tone understands itself without taking itself fully seriously. The animation models and colors were simple but they were pretty good and had some cute looking characters. Most of the voice acting was pretty good especially actor David Thewlis who gives the best voice performance from the entire cast. For the most part, it was never boring despite it being pretty predictable and some of the characters could have been explored a little more.

Overall, it was alright but good for children to have a good time.

Rating: B-

Story that has been told several hundred times in cartoons, feature and shortfilmlenght movies, theater, tv series and living very vividly in the folklore, namely the ratcatcher of hameln , germany, or the pied piper that stole all the children as ransom money for some ratpack work, so now you know...

but there are quite a few original digressions to the story, and maurice the cat is one of them, still not able to play the flute, he is the real mobster that steal from the poor and never gives it back...

production is pretty generic when it comes to advanced animation, and the first 30 minutes scriptwise isenglishenglish spoken uziwise at a heck of a speed without telling much actually, but after that it works, and they are able to draw you into the royamune of the ratking, an underground landscape so lavishly animated and coloured i just ended up fascinated.

So have a happy hour with maurice and his bunch, is a recommend from the grumpy old man.

Despite being one of the best selling and most acclaimed authors, up until now Terry Pratchett has never had any film adaptations. There have been a handful of TV specials (including Hogfather and Colour of Magic) and of course the recent Good Omens adaptation. However the big screen has always eluded the Discworld. This is not due to a lack of trying with both Sam Raimi and Terry Gilliam attempting to adapt his works for the big screen, but no productions have ever moved forwards. In some ways it's not too hard to see why. His Discworld series is so expansive and interconnected that it would be tough to adapt some of his popular stories like Mort for all audiences not familiar with his works. Along with this most stories usually have an impressive scale that would be more difficult to pull off. I mean, where would one even find a turtle suitably large enough to support 4 elephants?

So maybe that is why it makes sense that The Amazing Maurice would be his first to be adapted. It's Pratchett's first story written for children and whilst it takes place in the Discworld, it doesn't connect to the same extent some of his other stories taking place largely in a single town. It's a very loose "retelling" of the Pied Piper tale told by two separate narrators. The first narrator is the Amazing Maurice (Hugh Laure), a talking cat who leads a group of talking rats and a young boy named Keith (Himesh Patel) pretending to be the Pied Piper (the real Pied Piper is obviously a madman living in the middle of nowhere due to having cooked a town full of children). They all travel between towns pretending to infest the town with rats and then luring the "vermin" away. The second narrator is Malicia (Emilia Clarke), the Mayor's daughter who has spent her lifetime obsessing with books and story tropes. When she stumbles across Maurice and his group of talking rats, she sees an opportunity to get her own story moving and forces them to go on an adventure.

In terms of adapting someone like Pratchett who always had fun at prodding and satirising story tropes, Terry Rossio actually seems like he's well qualified for the job. He's got a good history of playing with story conventions in with his previous work on Aladdin, The Road to El Dorado and Shrek. And that talent does shine through with this screenplay. I don't think that it captures everything in Pratchett's writing, there are just too many aspects of Pratchett's style that were unique to the page that don't transfer to a different medium. But it still captures a lot of Pratchett's quick witted style along with a level of fourth wall breaking akin to something like Fleabag with characters regularly having catch up conversations with the audience.

There is also a cast full of charismatic characters being voiced by actors with great comedic timing like Emilia Clarke and David Thewlis. Hugh Laurie is especially good as the titular Maurice switching between a deceitful conman (or concat?) and a reluctant hero delivering some of the best lines of the film. This includes one of my favourite lines when they are discussing the ethics of scamming the towns: "But trickery is what humans are all about! They're so keen on tricking each other they elect governments to do it for them!"

Like a lot of animated films they have tried to emulate the look of a modern Disney film. Given the lower budget that the film was working with, they do a decent job at capturing this style. But because of this approach a lot of the character designs don't really stand out too much. This is with the key exception of the villain the Boss Man. His design stands out as something sinister more akin to characters like No-Face in Spirited Away or the Summerween trickster from Gravity Falls. Plus the animators do include a hdnful of Discworld easter eggs that fans will enjoy.

Overall, there are limitations to what this adaptation is able to accomplish. When you're adapting someone like Pratchett it is a challenge to condense even some of his more straightforward stories into a shorter medium and some elements are lost in the transfer from book to film. But it still captures the charm of his characters, his fun dialogue and still delivers enough strong laughs to make this a worthwhile recommendation.

The main characters of this cartoon are very funny, the design of the characters and the decor of the scenes, along with the sound of different parts and animation music, will be very attractive for all audiences, regardless of their age. Children will enjoy watching the talking orange cat, and parents and adult audiences will be entertained by the adventures and of course the wit of the amazing Morris troupe.

"The Amazing Maurice" animation has a lot of charm and like Ratatouille animation, it shows lovely mice. But it must be said that this work could not know its viewer well.

Although the animation of "The Amazing Morris" is not amazing enough, it is still a fun and interesting work.

A film based on Terry Pratchett's 2001 Carnegie Medal-winning book, "The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents." While the book was delightful, Toby Genkel's film falls short in terms of its visual style, unengaging story, and deviations from the source material. A strong voice cast, including Hugh Laurie, Emilia Clarke, and David Tennant, is the only saving grace of this film.

The story follows a talking cat named Maurice who goes to small villages with his rat buddies to solve their rat problems, but it's all just a scam. The gang crosses paths with the precocious narrator, Malicia, as they investigate a missing food crisis in a new village. Despite an A-list voice cast, the screenplay is not up to their skill set and the film lacks visually ambitious world-building.

Overall, "The Amazing Maurice" falls into the cliché fable genre and fails to live up to its potential as a unique adaptation of Terry Pratchett's work. It is a far cry from the Oscar-nominated animated film "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish," which offered unexpected twists and daring visuals.

I was positively shocked from watching this. It feels that this is what Disney has forgotten how to be. It's an animation. It's a stellar animation. It's an animation with talking animals. It's a comedy. It's satirical. And it's just... so, sooooo attentive to detail. Tons of carefully crafted mimicry and gestures, faces, expressions, poses. I can't quite remember the last time I saw anything like it.

Sure, there is no wow effect. It might not look great on the big screen, where you are supposed to see clear blobs of image, while counting every rendered piece of air, and with no pause or rewind. In terms of cost - this is obviously no big production(though the animation is spectacularly clean). But that's what the big productions lack nowadays - soul. Making a single meme face is enough. Meanwhile this little gem is just filled with emotion in every scene.

On top of that - I have to give props to the voice cast. Whether it's the script, the audio engineer or the relatively stellar cast - it's a pleasure to hear virtually any character in this film. I can't say that there's any remarkable music, given the budget, but it's enough to serve the purpose.

Finally, and this is important - this film is clean. There is no agenda. It's an honest family-friendly picture. Funny, with careful moral of the story woven in, just enough for the kids to figure out, but without being preachy or propagandistic.

Maybe the 9\10 rating is a bit too much, given that this is something to reserve only for historical pictures, but this is a small, European production. When even the multi-hundred-million dollar Hollywood flops often can't convince you - how else to show appreciation for the underdog?

Not sure about about amazing but defiantly entertaining throughout. I was surprised I was the only seeing the movie made it easy to make any sounds I wanted. Hugh Laurie was the main reason for seeing this and he was worthy I loved his character! I'm usually one of few to rate most everything highly in this case the movie has a lot more already done bits and is extremely similar to Puss in Boots: Last Wish because of a death character plus the acting with the story within the story was annoying otherwise I love the whole gang and has a few awesome moments where I laughed pretty hard. Overall a 6.5 would still recommend to anyone!

I really love terry pratchett novels including this one. The actors provided simple voice characterizations and that decision does not match with the tone or content of the young adult novel. They talk like they're speaking to four year old children but the script is not for that age group. Additionally the design of the scenery and of each character is simplistic. Sorry, but they didn't have the budget to pull this off. As a stand alone movie for someone who hasn't read any pratchett i give this movie a basic 5/10. Habving read all pratchett it's scoring a one out of ten. Like dune which uses internal observations, the movie doesn't pull those off.

Being a fan of Terry Pratchett's work, I felt slightly apprehensive when I heard that The Amazing Maurice is being made into a family film. The end result, however, is as entertaining and charming as I could hope for!

There have been some changes, of course, but the spirit of the book is pretty intact, even if somewhat lighter. The visual jokes are in line with Pratchett's style of humour, and the grim and sad tones of the story get through without getting too upsetting.

Most of the character designs are really good, the only really disappointing one being Malicia's needle-thin-with-a-massive-bobble-head design that is so typical of 3D animations of the past decade.

All in all I'm positively surprised with the film!

When I sat down here in 2023 to watch the 2022 animated movie "The Amazing Maurice", I did so with my son. And I have to say that we both found this animated movie to be rather enjoyable.

The storyline in "The Amazing Maurice", as written by Terry Rossio was quite good. I didn't know that it was based on a Terry Pratchett book, but that was definitely a nice thing. The story in "The Amazing Maurice" proved entertaining from start to end, and it offers something for children and adults alike. And that makes "The Amazing Maurice" a rather versatile and easily enjoyable animated movie.

With "The Amazing Maurice" being an animated movie, of course having a good voice acting cast is essential. And they definitely had that here, with the likes of Hugh Laurie, Emilia Clarke and David Thewlis, and many others.

The art style and animation style in "The Amazing Maurice" was good and enjoyable. There were a lot of attention to detail in all scenes, with lots of nice additions, which makes the movie suitable for more than just a single viewing.

I was genuinely entertained by "The Amazing Maurice" from directors Toby Genkel and Florian Westermann, and it is an animated movie that I warmly recommend you to watch if you enjoy animated fables.

My rating of "The Amazing Maurice" lands on a six out of ten stars.

It's almost impossible to do Terry Pratchet properly on film, because his unique charm consists of the wry observational humor of his narrative voice... and just how does one translate that to a medium that doesn't have a narrator?

Well, whatever you do, don't do what this production team did. You can feel the scriptwriters' desperation through the screen.

"Oh, my god, someone wants us to turn this into a movie.... what do we do?"

They try cringey song and dance numbers that have nothing to do with the plot. They try thinly veiled clumsy exposition. They try seasoning the thinly veiled clumsy exposition with not-at-all veiled clumsy exposition. They try going "meta", and interrupting the action to break the fourth wall and have one of the characters lecture us about stories. They try turning a prop from the book into a robot character that is basically R2D2 from star wars.

Yes, you heard me right, they put in a robot. In Discworld.

None of it lands.

Because no one loved this movie. It's transparently obvious that everyone from the voice actors to the scriptwriters to the animators just wanted to do their time, collect their paycheck, and get as far away from this trainwreck as fast as they possibly could.

You know a script is bad when even a season professional actor like Hugh Laurie can't breathe life into it.

This gets one star, not only because it's a horrifying zombie nightmare, but because it's a horrifying zombie nightmare created from the corpse of something bright and beautiful and good.

The one positive piece of hope I have for this production is that maybe they will take the price of my ticket, and book some time for the lead animator at a local cat cafe, so he can learn what an actual cat looks like.

You know, I remember having this book and never finishing it.

As I often feel, though I am vainly committed to being that guy on the train with a physical book, as a general rule, the novel is written by an amateur and the movie is created by professionals and that certainly feels like the case here.

An energetic and vibrant anthropomorphic tale up to the standard of the American stuff more or less. The setting is enchantingly quaint with its bright color palette and it explores the theme of story telling itself more intelligently than what I read of the book and certainly more than "The Wonder".

The jokes are so much less contrived and the characters really feel fully formed from the get-go. Remember the title is "The Amazing MAURICE" not "The amazing...whatever her name was" and the "stupid looking kid" feels like a person rather than a prop.

The usage of narration, framing devices and fourth wall breaks won't be for everyone but they commit to is and it allows what might have arguable been something of a generic bit of anthropomorphic fairy-storytelling to have a distinct personality and our most smug character gets put in her place by the cat himself.

The animation is not half-assed either.

The Amazing Maurice is a film based on a story by Terry Brachett. It is more of a story being told to the audience. I felt like it would be better if it utilized 2.5D animation with the type of story it is telling. It does seem like a good film for younger audiences. It seems more for little kids than young adults. I do feel like it's an alright film but it is more for people younger than myself. I do prefer Pixar when it comes to computer animation with the dedication they put into their animation and storytelling and their films seem more for all audiences. I might still like other computer animated projects like these though. I would recommend this if you like more fairytale type of films and even films made more for kids. I hadn't heard of this until my local library got it in their catalog. I figured why not watch it.

Maurice is a clever con artist, who makes villagers believe he is able to rid them of their rat problem. Off course, the rats are his friends and its all make-believe - and in the process they make a bundle of money. Working with them is a human called Keith, who is a pied piper (no, not the pied piper, who appears later in the movie).

Arriving in the town of Bad Blintz, they find evidence of rats but no rats in sight, and the town has a serious food shortage - with food simply disappearing. The major's daughter, Malicia - who is also the film's narrator - enlists Maurice and his team to help find the reason behind the town's food shortage, and so they embark on a mission to find the truth.

'The Amazing Maurice' is based on 'The Pied Piper' fairy tale, and also hints at 'Hansel and Gretel'. The animation is very good, and Maurice is marvelously voiced by Hugh Laurie. The film also cleverly mocks script writing clichés.

'The Amazing Maurice' is an easy to follow film young and old can enjoy. It would help a great deal if you're already familiar with The Pied Piper, off course. Either way, this movie will have kids roaring with laughter and adults are sure to enjoy it just as much - as I did.

The trick with a film like this is to make a film that is both accessible to everyone, and that includes young children as well as to the Terry Pratchett faithful. I'm delighted to say this film manages both in spades.

The casting is fantastic and the animation, including British animation is wonderful and a delight not to be in the world of Disney for an animated feature. I don't know much about Terry Pratchett, but I have read this book and it manages to hit all the points that I would expect, with great characters and so many laughs in the cinema where we watched an early showing. The children, especially with riveted it seemed.

I recently bought this on a whim for something to put on in the background for the kid, as I would like him to be familiar with Discworld as I was as a kid also. It held his attention and he loved the art style and the jokes, it's a lovely little film that as a good portion of the spirit of Terry in it. It may not be as dark as the book but it does it justice. A real must for fans and a no brainer for Discworld fan with children.

The voice acting is good, the characters engaging and it really does have the spirit of Terry in every frame. It still wants 40 words.....The Watch is awful, avoid that.

A very underappreciated animation. It was buried under tons of Christmas movies and people haven't noticed it.

My family and I very enjoyed watching the film. We laughed more than a few times. Of course, it may be another re-telling of the Pied Piper tale. But touches of Terry Pratchett's humor and cameo of his other characters make it special. And, personally, I liked that atmosphere in the film is darker than in a regular animation films. In my opinion, it's an animation for 10 yo and older.

Important note: I didn't read this book, so I had no expectations of this adaptation.

It's a 10 for me.

I quite liked the premiss of this animated comedy. The eponymous orange cat travels from town to town promising to help the citizens eliminate their perennial rat problems. Raising all the cash they can, they pay him and out of the blue a young lad appears and Hamelin-style, pipes all the offending rodents out of the town. Shortly afterwards, though, we realise that this is all a scam. "Maurice" is in league with his team of rats, and with the piper, and the money is to be used to enable them all to travel to a magical land mentioned in their sacred text (a comic book!). It's when they arrive in a town where they face a much greater danger, that "Maurice" has to raise his game and find the real "Pied Piper" and his pipe, if he is to save all his brethren from doom! It's a simple story with some fun characterisations - I liked "Dangerous Beans" and "Sardines" and the action flows along pleasingly for just ninety minutes. Certainly, it's a derivative hybrid of stories, and I found the narration really quite annoying after a while, but as a charming family adventure film that illustrates the values of teamwork, loyalty whilst still being peppered with some fun dialogue and scenarios, I quite enjoyed it.

Story is ok but not great. My kids were a bit excited at the beginning but felt bored for most of the movie. I think it was too long, there was not enough story and some scenes were unnecessarily long or didn't add much value.

I was ok engaged, but my kids were a bit confused with a few stories running in parallel and some flashbacks, so they struggled a bit to follow the story.

Overall it's an ok movie, good moral message, etc. But I was expecting better after reading some of the other reviews.

It was still good for a change since it's a British movie and different from Pixar and Disney movies which many times seem to follow the same pattern.

Yeah, it wasn't that bad but it's a big coincidence that this came out right after Puss in boots the last wish making it feel like a copy to the success, but I don't really have any problems with this movie. Besides, it's really cheap. It was in theaters for like not even that long and I don't really feel like anyone went to see it and it's actually a really underrated film I wish more people want to see it and it deserves way more credit. It's not the perfect movie but it's not the worst movie ever either, it's just a movie that anyone could enjoy and I feel like anyone can get some enjoyment out of it and it's just fine.

The Amazing Maurice (2022) -

Maybe my hopes were too high for this film, especially as I hadn't particularly enjoyed the other efforts made by Sky to bring Pratchett to the screen.*

Overall I felt that the production was cheap and trying too hard to replicate something akin to Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks, but without success.

And they almost seemed to be copying 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' (1993) with some of the human designs and costumes, as if the copyright checker hadn't bothered to do their job at all.

Although parody and copyright infringement were bound to be rife with the story itself obviously based on the Fairy Tale 'The Pied Piper Of Hamelin' and "Mr Bunnsy" a blatant rip off of Beatrix Potter. I'm not saying that it was wrong for that, because it WAS a parody and that was the whole point and what Terry Pratchett always did well in his writing.

However, this interpretation certainly didn't seem to be a Discworld story as it wasn't quite grimey enough.

I also felt that the production had adapted the story too much. It's been a very long time since I read the book, but I don't even remember the bookish narrator and later character of Malicia (Emilia Clarke) and I was pretty sure that even Keith, Maurice's piper (Himesh Patel), wasn't really aware of the scam that The Amazing Cat and the Rat's were actually pulling.

Originally the book was far more focussed on the animals and less on the humans, almost as a break from TP's other "Human" based stories set in Ankh Morpork and to lend a different perspective to the circular world.

I also found that there was none of the nuance, wit and subtlety of Terry's original work either. As if they had dumbed it down to make it for kids without caring too much about the adults, fans or the source material.

And at times it appeared obvious that some parts were done by artists that were more skilled than others. The human characters were very basically drawn, but some of the rats were quite detailed, the knitted texture of the rat guru, Dangerous Beans' (David Tennant) jumper was superbly rendered.

Some of the backgrounds were lush and verdant with texture, where others were bland and dull. According to the IMDB Trivia the film was made during lockdown and the various elements created separately at the artists homes. I felt it was clear that it hadn't been cared for in the normal way to sync the estranged teams together in a cohesive way, which was why it didn't feel as polished as a Pixar or Dreamworks production.

Upon entering a new town to ply their con trade, Maurice, his rats and Keith met Malicia who helped them to uncover what was really going on in her starving town and that was how the adventure continued, with fights against other rat catchers and another, more familiar pied piper too. I think the main problem was that they made the story in a very basic way, without elaborating on the characters enough, especially Maurice and the rats. The meeting between Keith and Malicia and they'd gradual involvement with each other was old hat and boring, whereas more depth to the characters of Sardines, Peaches (Gemma Arterton) or Darktan (Ariyon Bakare) would have made this much funnier in the same way that the Minions stole the show in 'Despicable Me' (2010).

I got really tired, really quickly of the breaking of the fourth wall thing too. The "Mr Bunnsy" excerpts were fine, but I could never tell if Malicia was acting in her narrator role or as her character in the middle of the story.

Most of the vocal performance was fine, but I really didn't think that Hugh Laurie's voice suited Maurice. It was a bit too similar to his vocal performance in 'Arthur Christmas' (2011) as the sarcastic and selfish Steve Christmas.

Funnily enough though I felt that internet star Joe Sugg in the role of Sardines did a great job, considering that he is usually more of a presenter or a 'Strictly Come Dancing' (2004-) contestant.

In the end I felt that it could have been done a lot better, but it was okay and would probably entertain a really young audience.

532.18/1000.

* Hogfather (2006), The Colour Of Magic (2008) and Going Postal (2010), which wasn't actually bad at all and the exception.