MAGIC BEACH Reviewed by GREG KING
Director: Robert Connolly
Stars: Luka Sero, Spencer Ellis Anderson, Rylee Chuck, Elliott Hayes, Summer Jeon, Frankie Pollard, Flynn Wandin, Sebastian Sero, Anezka Sero.

At our beach,
at our magic beach,
we swim in the sparkling sea,
surfing and splashing
and jumping the waves
shrieking and laughing with glee.
Thus begins Alison Lester’s beloved award winning 1990 illustrated book. Lester’s book celebrated the power of the imagination, the importance of play, and it captured the warmth and excitement of spending time at the beach. The book was largely inspired by her own experiences of spending time at the beach with her own children.
Veteran Australian filmmaker Robert Connolly (Paper Planes, etc) brings to life Lester’s book in this mix of live action and animation. To help him bring his vision to the screen Connolly has enlisted the talents of ten of Australia’s top animators and illustrators and he has given them free rein to create their own vignettes, which have been inspired by the book’s illustrations. These collaborators include Emma Kelly, Anthony Lucas, Susan Danki, Lee Whitman, Kathy Sarpi, Eddie White, Simon Rippingale, Pierce Davison, Marieka Walsh and Jake Duczynski.
Each of them brings their own idiosyncratic style and distinctive aesthetic to their contributions. The broad range of animation styles included stop motion and traditional 2D hand drawn illustrations. Connolly himself handles the linking scenes of children reading the titular book and then dreaming of their own adventures on the beach.
For me the standout sequences were Emma Kelly’s The Horses, in which a character named James rode a white horse under the ocean and experienced a sense of freedom and wonder; Anthony Lucas’ The Smugglers, which cleverly uses the stop motion process; and Pierce Davison’s sequence Castle V Castle, in which two children wage war over their sandcastles with their imaginations creating weapons for the battle to defend their constructions. As with most anthology films the quality varies throughout.
There’s a whimsical quality to the project, but I found Magic Beach a little uneven and underwhelming.
★★☆