Animated productions in which talking animals trot off on great big adventures and learn Important Life Lessons are a dime a dozen, but The Lost Tiger is a little different to standard fare. It’s the first Australian animated feature to be written and directed by an Indigenous woman, Bardi film-maker Chantelle Murray, who rolls out plenty of children’s movie tropes but imbues the experience with some unexpected heft.
Potentially cheesy subjects – like home and belonging – are unpacked without that terrible lecturing feel that makes you want to bolt for the exit and curse the day you decided to have children (kidding, kidding). There’s nothing amazing about this movie but you can always feel it coming from a place of thought and care, even when it makes sharp plot turns and leans too hard on formula.
After being abandoned as a joey, the eponymous Teo (voiced by Thomas Weatherall) is adopted by two kangaroos, Kara (Nakkiah Lui) and Red (Jimi Bani), who lead a wrestling troupe called “Roomania”. Their WWE-esque show enables bursts of body-slamming spectacle, though the real excitement begins when Teo visits a museum and is identified by Plato (an elastic-voiced Rhys Darby), a bookish platypus, as one of the last remaining Thylacines.
Legend has it that a lost “Tiger Island” inhabited by Thylacines exists. So of course Teo and Plato go looking for it, with two groups of anthropomorphised animals on their trail: Teo’s worried family and a slightly irritating group of villains called the “Adventurer’s Guild”, who are led by the scheming quoll Quinella (Celeste Barber). She’s like the worst aspects of Indiana Jones but on steroids, matching Jones’s “it belongs in a museum” philosophy with an insatiable appetite for self-aggrandisement.
Teo locates the island (and fellow Thylacines) surprisingly easily, and fairly early in the run time. Here he reconnects with his ancestry and family, including the elder Nana, who’s fabulously voiced by Rahmah Binte Buyong – sounding wise, worldly, and eminently huggable. In one interestingly staged scene, Teo discovers what happened to his late mother. Like in Edgar Wright’s horror movie Last Night in Soho, it’s not quite a flashback, because, via the act of dreaming, Teo is transported through time, becoming a virtualised presence at the scene of his mum’s death, unable to intervene in the cosmic order of things.
The second half pivots into a story about colonial oppressors extracting natural resources against the wishes and interests of the custodians of the land, which of course contains ripe political metaphors. There’s also that question of belonging: does Teo belong in the old world, which doesn’t exist any more, or the new one, where he feels like an outsider? The emergence of this key theme reminded me of the poster tag-line for Stephen Page’s Bangarra-performed dance movie Spear, which also explores notions of heritage and dual identity: “A foot in each world. A heart in none.” But The Lost Tiger is a children’s movie so, of course, Teo has a big heart in both, always appreciating his adopted family while being thrilled to learn more about where he comes from.
When characters in animated movies deliver emotionally charged dialogue, it sometimes makes you want to dry retch; I’m still fighting off memories of Jacki Weaver’s granny-like crocodile in Back to the Outback telling her animal brethren not to define themselves by “the label on your cage” but, puh-lease, the one “in your heart”. But the emotional moments in The Lost Tiger work out pretty well: in fact, lines such as “this is your land, this is your country” register as genuinely profound.
Sometimes, as if out of nowhere, bursts of colour and razzmatazz come on like claps of thunder, ticking the box marked “visual stimulus” – but mostly this film is quite evenly tempered, Murray letting individual moments breathe.
The Lost Tiger is in Australian cinemas now
