“You’re Misfit; you’re an oddball, you’re a freak! Mousey ears atop a birdy beak. I’ve never seen a bird so peculiar, so absurd. How about we play a game of hide-and-seek, if you can? As a mouse, to me, you seem to be just terrible. Fitting in is more than dress-up and pretend. If it’s fitting in you’re desperate for, come down, search no more; I know the perfect place for you, my friend!”
Gillian Anderson is amazing in the role of the cat with her suggestive voice and cunningness, just like a cat can be, especially when it comes to mice and birds. In a few sentences, she defines the main character Robin in the eponymous 32-minute stop-motion musical Robin Robin – a must-have dessert for this time of the year.
Created by Mike Please and Dan Ojari, it is a beautiful, incredibly warm, visually exceptional and a suitable reminder of how important it is to be authentic, true to your nature and, not to forget, the significance of walking the path to self-discovery.
We can draw certain analogies and parallels between Robin Robin and The Ugly Duckling, the famous classic story by Hans Christian Andersen. Still, the circumstances, the setting and the course of the action are totally different.
One rainy evening, an egg rolls out of its nest and ends up near the home of mice. This is where Robin (the young star Bronte Carmichael) is born and the circumstances in which she becomes part of that family; whose empathetic father is full of understanding and love for Robin. As she grows, she learns to be like them with their best surviving skills.
And what are mice best at? Sneaking into who-mans’ homes and stealing crumbs and leftovers.
“Don’t make a sound, don’t leave a trace
Keep to the shadows, take what we need
The rules of The Sneak are these!”
And everything would have been fine if Robin had the same stealthy skills as her adoptive family. But poor Robin fails to be quiet and resourceful, on the contrary!
“Da-da-doo-da-loo, whoop!”
She is loud and inattentive, thus destroying her family’s operation. Robin dreams of being a mouse; she even raises the feathers on her head to make mouse ears, in order to fit in, to become one of them. “I wish I wasn’t a bird, I wish I was a mouse, a real one” – is her greatest wish. After a failed mission with her family, Robin meets Magpie (Richard E. Grant extraordinarily delivers the old, lonely, materialistic-driven Magpie), who cannot fly because his wing is injured while Robin cannot fly because she never learned; that is, she did not want to learn. Magpie tells her about the tradition of the wishing star, and Robin sets on a mission to get that star from the who-mans and finally become a mouse. But not everything goes so smoothly. On that expedition, she confronts her biggest enemy – the cat and various obstacles that need to be overcome. During her adventure, Robin is forced to act like a bird, to fly in order to escape.
And as always, the journey becomes much more important than the goal. On that quest, Robin matures, learns and accepts her true nature because, ultimately, that’s when we can all be most useful for ourselves and others.
