Feature – UK, Kuwait / European Première

Showing @ Cineworld 8, Sun 24 Jun @ 13.20 & Cineworld 12, Mon 25 Jun @ 19.00

Dave Osborne / UK/Kuwait / 2011 / 82 min

Given Pixar’s singular success (and inexhaustible budgets), evident with Brave at this year’s festival, can there really be any film to convincingly rival its animation hegemony? The 99 Unbound shows that other attempts are still a fair way behind, with an adaptation of Naif Al-Mutawa’s popular comic strip, The 99. The film brings together the first five members of the 99 in possession of Noor stones (gems imbued with all the wisdom of 13th century Baghdad).

As far as children’s films go, the story of The 99 Unbound isn’t bad. All of the heroes – each one embodying one of the 99 attributes of Allah – have their own unique power provided by whichever Noor stone they possess and deliver action-packed, moral justice. It’s also interesting to see something a little different from the generic output of western cinema. However, the CGI is the biggest pitfall in this film (and that’s pretty big in a computer animation), looking more like the interludes from a video game fifteen years ago. This may not be the end of the world but when you’ve got the beauty of, let’s say, Wall-E, why would you watch Pacman?