‘Excommunication is just too good for him! I ought to boil him in his personal drawing ink!” Pope Leo X (voiced by Toast of London’s Matt Berry) could be very cross certainly with Leonardo da Vinci for dissecting cadavers. “It makes my abdomen all queasy-weasy!” Berry’s papal peevishness is a spark of pleasure in an in any other case drab youngsters film about Leonardo in his later years, made utilizing a mixture of stop-motion and hand-illustrated animation. It’s a little bit of a bore and a chore, and feels just like the type of “instructional” movie that shall be foisted on youngsters at school throughout moist playtime on wet days.
The person himself is voiced by Stephen Fry (not bothering with an Italian accent; the script drops within the odd per favore and grazie to compensate). The movie opens in Rome, 1516, and Leonardo’s scientific explorations have put him in scorching water with the pope. Why can’t the outdated boy keep on with portray “fairly photos”, mumbles Leo X. So Leonardo accepts a proposal from King Francis I of France to affix his court docket.
There actually isn’t a lot of a narrative after this in co-director Jim Capobianco’s script (he was Oscar-nominated for the screenplay of Pixar’s Ratatouille). In France, Leonardo quickly discovers the younger king is simply one other puffed-up preening monarch – Francis greenlights his plans for an “splendid metropolis”, however solely on the situation that there’s a humongous statue of himself delight of place. In fact, Francis doesn’t give two hoots about science or progress.
That offers Leonardo loads of time to poke about with lifeless our bodies and ponder life’s biggies: why are we right here? What’s our goal? Normally, these are the sorts of questions that youngsters like to chew on – however in locations the movie feels as full of life as one of many corpses. The whizzing, whirring marvel of Leonardo’s thoughts by no means involves life; perhaps it’s the lacklustre script, or Fry’s donnish, dodderish efficiency. It doesn’t assist that he seems to be extra Father Christmas than Renaissance man.
