Metacritic reviews

Jean-Francois Laguionie’s consistently enjoyable, inventive and beautifully crafted tale is a color riot suitable for all ages.

With striking visuals reminiscent of Matisse and Chagall and a refreshingly (for domestic animation audiences) grown-up storyline, The Painting is almost reminiscent of, well, a work of art.

Creative, colorful, and unexpectedly wise, The Painting is the latest offshore animation to show to kids burned out on computer-generated Hollywood toons.

It’s a fanciful conceit and a well-animated parable about prejudice, standards of beauty and the shifting sands of the painters’ art.

This is a sweet adventure story for children. (Surely, American parents can deal with the bare breasts of one talking painting.) For adults it is short on narrative sophistication but visually a true objet d’art.

For those able to overlook the obviousness, The Painting is both beautiful and affecting.

Its aesthetic employs expressionism, realism, and cubism, but the morality plays are layered on as thickly and haphazardly as a toddler's finger painting.

Kids with healthy attention spans may warm to its (literally) colorful characters and outside-the-frame action, but most will find it as lifeless as their parents do.

Laguionie's animation is a lovely jumble of thick lines and saturated pastels...But while the artist-as-deity concept was flattering enough to get The Painting nominated for a 2012 Cesar Award, its big ideas about equality and friendship are flatly 2-D.