A good movie

I already saw this movie but since it was a while back, I thought I might as well check it out again. To be honest, I wasn’t really impressed the first time around I watched the damned thing. Indeed, there is a huge market for Dutch movies for kids, in my opinion, mostly young kids can’t watch foreign movies because, in the Netherlands, they don’t dub movies in Dutch so as long as they can’t read fast enough, children can watch only Dutch productions. So, many of these are usually quite successful but most of the time I find them really average. This one is probably considered the very best one in the Netherlands, it was a huge success at the box-office and even won the Golden Calf of the Best Dutch movie of the year. With this in mind, I had some really high expectations but, honestly, I thought the whole thing was rather underwhelming. However, since it is classic, I thought I should give it a second chance and, after all these years, I was finally able to really appreciate it. Sure, the whole thing still looked really cheap and the plot remains rather silly but I have to admit that it was actually fairly entertaining. Above all, it is one of the rare movies were the talking animals are actually quite hilarious and not a useless and terribly annoying gimmick. Furthermore, even if Theo Massen’s character still remain a terribly whimpy guy with no backbone whatsoever, Carice van Houten (in her breakthrough, at least, in the Netherlands) was just really charming and completely nailed this performance. Anyway, to conclude, even if I still believe that such Dutch family features are usually terribly tedious, this movie might be one of the rare exceptions. Indeed, it actually works and I think it is definitely worth a look, especially if you want to see something with your kids.


7/10