Flora & Ulysses (2021)

Flora & Ulysses (2021)

6/10

Starring

Matilda Lawler

Alyson Hannigan

Ben Schwartz

Anna Deavere Smith

Directed by Lena Khan

Well Flora and Ulysses is one of those movies you can be sure would not have done magnificently well in the box office. So the movie fits the digital release on Disney+ and I enjoyed the movie regardless of the TV movie feel. The movie does not boast of a huge budget dedicated to CGI effect which can be felt when you see the weird feral cat, but not on Ulysses. Most of the CGI budget were focused on the squirrel.

What the movie does for me is the clumsy character it made of Flora’s dad George played by Ben Schwartz. His performance in this movie is funny, but it is nowhere as cool as that of the lead, Flora (Matilda Lawler). She on her own had the smile and the charisma to keep the movie going and I was thrilled seeing her on screen each time.

The movie plot introduces us to Flora, a very interesting young lady who is majorly into comics. We get to understand that her parents are separated with Flora living with her mum.

I do like the way the movie chose to handle this separation. We can see that Flora wanted her parents back together, but she was not losing sweat over it. The effects of the separation is mostly seen on the parents than the child. So we do not get the same old child acting out gets to meet a pet and it changes her outlook wave of movies like we are used to. Flora in this movie is full of life and she is focused on being real and trying to get to live her life with hope of everything working out well for her in the end.

On her way home one faithful day, she sees her neighbor struggling to keep an automatic vacuum device under control. She goes to help, and the vacuum device goes far much out of control and sucks up a squirrel believing it to be dirt that needs cleaning. Flora finally catches up to the runaway vacuum and saves this squirrel’s life. The squirrel’s experience gave it superpowers – It could fly, has super-strength, could understand humans and has a thing for poetry. Flora named the squirrel after the vacuum, Ulysses. The antagonist in this movie is the animal control man who was called in to capture the squirrel after Flora took Ulysses to an eatery and he got out.

Now Flora and her dad, with Flora’s not blind, but blind neighbor must find away to keep Ulysses safe from the animal control man, and from Flora’s mum.

The movie is based on a series of children’s book of the same name by Kate DiCamillo.

In the end, I feel this is a nice movie to see with your family. It is not one of those classics from Disney that you will want to see over and over again, but it is a good feel.