★★★★ There was a time when this kind of film was common: an adventure with boys and for boys, from an eminently childish point of view, which appealed to realism in the image and emotion in the story. It seemed that they were made easily but, you see, their scarcity and almost exceptionality prove otherwise. Here is a lion cub that has escaped from some traffickers and is found by a twelve-year-old girl who decides to take it back to Africa with the help of her brother and her grandfather, while half the world is chasing them. There are moments in which the little animal is digital and moments in which he is real, but the most important thing is that at no time does naivety appear overacted. The strangeness is that it is not a film made by someone who thinks he knows the boys (here actually preteens) but actually narrated from them. There is, in the relationship with the eccentric grandfather, a community of interests and forms: they are outcasts in a society in which they have become, like the stolen lion, invisible. But this metaphor, let’s be clear, is not emphasized in any way at any time: what the screen offers is an adventure, movement and emotions. It offers us cinema, nothing less.
