Asterix and the Vikings (2006)

Asterix and the Vikings arrives from 2006, an English-first production that assembled American voice talent and then dubbed itself back into French, which is a curious way to honor a comic born in Paris. It adapts, loosely, the album Asterix and the Normans, and it holds the distinction of being the last traditionally animated Asterix feature to reach theaters. The animation is handsome. The script is not, and critics at the time said so with the weary politeness reserved for family entertainment.

The film's engagement with contemporary social questions is close to nil, and it does not pretend otherwise. The Vikings are a comedy of misunderstanding, their chief chasing a Champion of Fear because he mishears his adviser's proverb. The single figure who gestures toward anything like modern self-assertion is Abba, the chief's daughter, who smuggles herself aboard her father's ship in male disguise after being told she cannot come. She is spirited. She is also, by the final reel, chiefly a prize for the visiting Gaul, and the film has no argument to make about her place in the world. Justforkix, the lazy nephew, is a vegetarian and a pacifist, traits the village greets with bafflement, but the joke lands on him and the resolution is his conversion to courage, not a defense of his temperament. Obelix's appetite supplies the running gag, and nobody involved appears to have wondered whether the gag required a thesis.

The moral, delivered by Getafix in the closing moments, is that real courage means overcoming fear. It is a pleasant sentiment, offered once, without insistence. The film wants to amuse children and their parents for ninety minutes, and it succeeds at that modest ambition. As a document of the culture wars, it is a blank page. As a sommelier might say of a vintage with no structure and no finish: drinkable, forgettable, and unlikely to be cellared.