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Asterix in Britain Movie Review

Asterix in Britain is a 1986 French animated comedy film directed by Pino van Lamsweerde. It’s a very good adaptation of a lesser comic.

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“I came, I saw, and I don’t believe my eyes…“

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I actually did not care all that much for this particular volume. Of all the original Asterix comic books, this one wasn’t as funny or as impactful due to the English translation ruining any potential of comedy there. This is why I ended up liking the film adaptation much more than the original source material. It is in French after all. Finally I could enjoy this story in its original form.

The plot is very faithfully lifted from the comic and I still find it to be only solid as many volumes had much better storytelling than this one. However, the movie flows well due to terrific pacing and it never overstays its welcome due to a short runtime of 80 minutes. The mayhem that erupts in the second half is a lot of fun to observe and the humor is terrific.

As I’ve already mentioned above, there is a lot of great humor to be mined from all these Englishmen speaking in French but with a highly exaggerated British accent. This mixture produced a very unique, crazy whip on me and listening to their voices and speech patterns never ceased to amuse me. They were very well developed as characters and quite enjoyable in their dialogue.

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Who else was great here? Obelix. He was hilarious, especially in his disgusted reactions at the British cuisine, which was gloriously made fun of in this story. Obelix continuously stole the movie from everybody else with his annoyance at being called fat and also him wishing to beat up Romans. Asterix was also quite memorable and very much a brute here. Caesar and the Romans are also very well utilized within this story while Dogmatix himself got a couple of wonderful sequences. The scene where he beat up a bully bulldog due to magic potion was so funny and very endearing.

The ending with the gang inventing tea for the British was of course very memorable and the beginning was intriguing as we did not see Asterix and the Gauls until almost the second act. But that second act is where the story suffered significantly as all the confusion with the potion and the barrels led to some rather repetitious and less interesting scenarios. The villain is okay and solidly designed, but he needed more development at the end of the day.

Asterix in Britain looks gorgeous. This is Disney-level quality of animation that I simply ate up. The backgrounds are full of color and very polished while the attention to detail is also admirable here. The designs of the characters were great as well. It’s a beautiful-looking movie that was particularly impressive in the natural landscapes and town scenery.

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The soundtrack is also fantastic with that opening and closing number being so much fun and once again representing a great 80s banger. The movie is so well scored, but the voice acting was a mixed bag as once again they changed the voice actors, which led to odd-sounding characters. Why they had the need to constantly change the voice actors is befuddling to me. But other than that, this is a rare movie that trumped its source material in my book.