Peter and the Wolf Review

Peter and the Wolf is a 2006 Polish Oscar winning animated short film that is very strong and an interesting experiment.

This tale has been adapted so many times before in an animated form, but this time around the approach is different – more serious, realistic and with no dialogue and gags whatsoever. It is an overly serious film at times with not a particularly engaging, adventurous tone to it and I wanted better characterization, but still this interesting experiment mostly paid off and I am quite fine with its Oscar win.

I really liked the film’s ending which is beautiful. The film has some very strong scenes such as the tree one of course, but I wanted more of the wolf in the film. He is still memorable but underutilized, Peter is okay and of course the duck, cat and crow are the highlights. The animation is truly terrific and I could see that it was an international production with a solid budget as the stop-motion here is fantastic with excellent character design in particular.

Peter and the Wolf isn’t entirely successful as this interesting experiment on telling this tale, but it mostly succeeds owing to superb animation and some wonderful scenes.