Asterix and the Big Fight (1989)

Asterix and the Big Fight arrives with a title it does not earn. The 1989 French animated feature, the sixth in the series, borrows its English name from one comic and its plot from another, adapting The Soothsayer while leaving the promised big fight largely offscreen. Getafix takes a menhir to the head, courtesy of Obelix, and descends into amnesia and lunacy. A fraudulent soothsayer named Prolix moves into the vacuum, trading bogus prophecies for food, then gold, then the wholesale evacuation of a village. It is a fable about credulity. The Romans are functionaries. The druid is a plot device.

The film's cultural inventory is thin, and we record that without complaint. The cast is a conventional ensemble of French voice actors. No LGBTQ themes stir beneath the tunics. Race does not enter the Gaul-versus-Roman rivalry, which is a matter of empire and stubbornness. The forest is scenery, not an ecosystem under threat. Prolix fleeces the gullible for supper, but the target is superstition, not capital. Obelix's bulk exists to justify his strength, nothing more. Getafix's madness comes from blunt cranial trauma and is played for laughs. History here is a sandbox, not a revision. And nobody lectures. The women of the village do lead the final charge against the Roman camp, which grants them a modest share of the resolution, though the comics got there decades earlier.

What remains is a brisk, harmless piece of European animation, dubbed and re-dubbed, once into an American version that renamed the druid Vitamix and called the menhirs rockets. There is no message to decode, no sermon to endure, no agenda lurking behind the boars and the bard. The film simply wants to be funny about a village that cannot brew its own potion. It mostly succeeds. We file it accordingly, under comedy, and move on.