Mavka: The Forest Song review – fetching Ukrainian folk tale of sprites resisting invaders

This Ukrainian animated feature offers a bricolage of tropes from a wide range of children’s stories; mostly these derive from other movies but there’s a strong, proper folk-story spine in there too. Forest sprite protagonist Mavka (voiced in the English version by Laurie Hymes) is a fetchingly designed ingenue with green hair, disproportionally large doe eyes and magical healing skills, who lives in a part of the forest where humans no longer go, thanks to an old treaty between them and the forest spirits. But wealthy villainess Kalina wants to acquire an elixir from a magic tree in the forest that keeps her from ageing, so she sends a guileless young musician hunk named Lucas in to the forest to find it – and he promptly makes friends/falls in love with Mavka.

Squint very, very hard and you might be able to divine an allegory in there about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Kalina representing Russian aggressors who only want to strip the forest of its resources. The local peasants, unusually for these sort of films, are very much coded as being from a specific country, what with their red and white traditional Ukrainian dress and tendency to break into throat singing when the mood takes them.

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