Argonuts (Epic Tales, Pattie et la colère de Poséidon) is a CGI animated film set in Yolcos, Ancient Greece and is about a young mouse named Pattie who is a fan of her town heroes, Jason and the Argonauts.
She dreams of setting out to sea on her own adventure one day, but her peers at school laugh at her because how could a small mouse achieve such great feats of strength? Even after being bullied for years, Pattie keeps hoping she can find a way to go out to sea and experience new sights. When the town’s beloved treasure, the Golden Fleece of legend is stolen by the angry god Poseidon, Pattie seizes her chance to set sail and save the town!
While this movie is your standard treasure hunt with somewhat predictable thrills and spills along the way, if you look deeper, there’s other themes of found family, forgiveness, making friends, caring for others and never giving up when the odds seem stacked against you. It’s these more emotional subplots that made the story interesting to me.
Pattie is an orphan, and her guardian is Sam, an orange cat who is a vegetarian that loves books and theatre. Sam is kind and always there for Pattie but lets his own anxieties get the best of him and ends up hurting her feelings. Sam had to swallow his pride and realise that he was holding Pattie back from fully realising her dreams because of his own fears. I quite liked his character growth throughout the story because it showed that even if you love someone and have the best intentions for them, it’s not right to hide things and stop someone from doing things you don’t personally like.
Pattie meets a bird named Chickos who encourages her to leave the town to seek out a treasure that will appease Poseidon’s wrath. Chickos has a personality like a rugged old sea captain and the battle scars to match. In contrast to the super cautious Sam, Chickos seems fearless to the point of insanity but has perhaps experienced more in life than we will ever know, as his character doesn’t really get any back story. Which I would have liked in order to break him away from being a bit one dimensional.
Pattie has a very cute design with big round eyes and a soft grey colour. In fact, many of the characters have a really soft design to them, favouring rounder shapes and facial features that makes them all look very huggable.
If you like monsters from Greek mythology, the kraken, a hoard of cyclops and a hydra make an appearance, and even though they are meant to be scary beasts to challenge the protagonist, I still found their designs cute as well. The animation is smooth and the characters never feel too stiff, such as the fur textures moving nicely and actually looking like something soft to touch.
The overall colour palette of the film is warm and bright, giving that feeling of a cheerful and vibrant port town. In contrast, the latter conflict with the villains of the story and is set at nighttime, allowing the colours to shift to cooler tones and set the sombre mood for the dire situation that our heroes find themselves in.
There’s a few little musical segments in the film, something that is not often included in animated films of more recent times. I really enjoyed these as the characters would move in time with the music creating some satisfying visual patterns or bobbing their heads. Some of the background music sounded vaguely familiar but I couldn’t figure out where I had heard it before. I really had to know because it was bugging me! After some research, these are music snippets are from ‘The A Team’ and ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’!
Overall, Argonuts is an enjoyable watch, but generally my fellow adults may find it a little too predictable. Children being the target audience should enjoy this movie and its sillier moments, especially if they love cute anthropomorphic animals. Parents watching this with their children may find the subplots a good chance to teach good morals.