Ainbo is an amazing film.
The design of the village and jungle and characters are all fantastic!
the ‘twist’, is that the main character, who is 100% indigenous and is the person who an ancestral link to the spirits, is mixed, her father is white and that is shown as fine and in no way diminishing her indigenosity. .
The ‘bad guy’, does what Harry Potter says Snape story does, but actually well. He loved her dead mother, hated her dad, hates her because the curse that is ruining their village started the year she was born so he believes she’s the reason.
When faced with evidence that she isn’t, he immediate admits he was wrong, and works to make up for it by joinning her to bring down the curse and ends up adopting her to be his father.
The animal spirits are mostly funny. Kinda timon and pumba but crossed with Manny from Ice Age as someone watched it with me said. Kinda too many fat jokes with the (pig? I dont know south american animals. The one that isn’t a pangolin. Also the pangolin might be another animal, I dont know south american animals.)
Greed and cutting down the rain forest is the bad thing. It is cured by embracing ancestry, culture and the spirits.The turtle is really cool.
THE LAVA GOD HAS A LAVA LAMP
The animation is good, not amazing but definetly working above it’s budget. Only real problem with design I’d find is that the two main female characters look very similar, like not exactly but the child I was with was unable to tell them apart.
The big fight at the end is with a giant scorpion made of diggers and trucks and stuff.
It’s not perfect but it’s pretty, same level as Disney just without the budget and indigenous focused, not shying from damage of capitalism and colonialism too while also not focusing on it.
It’s kind of an anti-pocahontas.