Azur & Asmar: The Princes' Quest

This animation fairy-tale is parable on tolerance between races, creeds and classes. It is a useful antidote to mundane everyday life in which those distinctions are very much alive. The message of the movie is delivered in a rather crude way and not through indirect suggestion.It is visually beautiful but the copy I saw in Greece did not have subtitles for the lines that were delivered in Arab dialect- I do not know whether this was a deliberate policy or it just happened in the copy I saw. Nevertheless it is a fine movie with a message for male friendship and co-operation between different people even when they are different in colour, creed and class. I recommend it for younger audiences primarily but also for older people although I don't think that a movie will make them change their mind on such issues. The arabic setting is picturesque and the movie is difficult to situate chronologically since the white boy receives the training of a medieval to post-medieval gentleman while the ship he uses is more of the age of great discoveries. The clothes of the Arabs I can not locate in history since my knowledge of costumes in Arab lands is inadequate.But the point is not historical veracity but the message of tolerance which is a child of European Enlightment one would say although this is a very qualified statement regarding the situation of the natives in European colonies. But the Ottoman Empire a supposed multicultural state practiced discrimination towards Jews and Christians, the infidels or jimmies but not on the scale of Catholic Spain for example. I would say that the movie expresses a wish and not a concrete historical reality during which the most that different people could hope for was mutual indifference. But it is a noble a commendable dream, better than other dreams that attempted to materialize as historical realities-as the Nazi dream of the thousand year era of Aryan supremacy.A well-intentioned movie.