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This well-thought-out title is an interactive story beautifully narrated by Academy-Award winning actor Ben Kingsley. Kingsley, in the role of the Story Teller, offers a pleasant, pleasurable stroll through an Amazon village and its surroundings. The story follows jungle-boy Kiyeko's effort to retrieve the Night, stolen by a couple of snakes reminiscent of Disney's bad-guy animal characters (the sea witch's twin eels in The Little Mermaid spring immediately to mind), through 11 different animated scenes - from Kiyeko's village in the Amazon jungle, through the forest, to the snakes' lair, and back again. The well-drawn graphics, which integrate 3D backgrounds with 3D animations, and movie-style quality of the title are lovely to look at, regardless of your age. On the other hand, the treatment of the story as an animated movie makes for some problems in an interactive environment. Enter a scene, and the story, which appears in text at the top of the screen, takes several minutes to read. Even with Kingley's lilting voice in accompaniment, the pace is Proustian, and will seem especially slow to an impatient five-year-old who may be more used to the frenetic energy of Saturday morning cartoons. It's certainly well-designed, and everything works; there aren't any incomplete, fuzzy, or jumpy areas, and the product was obviously a labor of love on the part of the folks at Ubi Soft. If yours is a leisurely household - or you just want to cultivate a little more of the stuff - this title might just be the ticket. It's certainly an alternative to watching The Lion King for the 1,000th time. There's over 8000 hand drawn frames creating a rich, full-screen animated environment, 45 minutes of original music and sound effects, and 220 hilarious click-on animations to enjoy. Reading and foreign language learning with voices and text in English, Spanish, French, Italian and German. It's based on Vladimir Hulpach's "The Snakes Who Stole the Night." Developed in participation with the National Center for Cinematography and the French Ministry of Industry. |
