Mune: Guardian of the Moon (2015)

Mune: Guardian of the Moon arrives from France with an amber sun-guardian, a fur-covered faun, and a wax girl, all of them toiling inside colossal temple-beasts to keep day and night on schedule. The design work is genuinely lovely, all soot textures and dream sequences rendered in flat 2D. The voice cast, Omar Sy included, is diverse by ordinary French industry standards, and the film treats that as staffing, not statement. Nobody in this cosmos is race-coded, because nobody in this cosmos is quite human.

The film's most scrutinized element is Glim, a girl made of wax who melts in sunlight and is therefore, in the production's own framing, a character with a disability. She shows courage. She also spends a stretch of the running time fluttering her eyelashes while the males get promoted, a point a French Elle critic raised at the time. The gesture toward physical difference is real but modest. Elsewhere, the film gestures at ecological balance, since restoring the Sun and Moon means restoring harmony, though the register is mythic cosmology rather than environmental advocacy. Mune himself is shy and taciturn, modeled on Edward Scissorhands, which is temperament, not diagnosis.

What the film declines to do is instructive. There is no economic critique; Necross is a corrupted guardian puppeted by a parasite, not a landlord. There is no racial commentary, no historical record to revise, and no romantic configuration beyond the closing kiss between the faun and the wax girl. The moral, about self-belief and keeping the world in balance, arrives through chase sequences and glowing temples instead of a lecture. This is a handsome, sincere children's fantasy with a handful of contemporary touches at its edges and no interest in pressing them. It is pleasant. It is also, in the taxonomy of such things, nearly inert.