Jean-Christophe Roger and Julien Chheng’s animated film Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia begins with Celestine the mouse (Pauline Brunner) excitedly waking Ernest the bear (Lambert Wilson) from a long hibernation. Their simple domestic ritual—she clambers up to the stove to prepare bowls of hot chocolate while he lumbers groggily downstairs to join her—is quietly enchanting thanks to the film’s expressive, elegant hand-drawn aesthetic.
The fact that the film’s two protagonists are such different sizes also allows A Trip to Gibberitia to explore each part of its lovingly crafted world from two distinct perspectives. Throughout, the filmmakers continually find creative ways for Celestine to traverse Ernest’s mountainous furniture while he blunders over everything in his path like a one-man slapstick show.
Ernest and Celestine’s happy domesticity is interrupted when the mouse accidently smashes the bear’s prized violin, leading them on an unexpected journey back to his homeland in the hopes of getting it repaired. However, they quickly discover that Gibberitia is no longer the melody-filled place that it used to be. In fact, music has been banned outright by a national decree.
We quickly discover that the person behind this law is Ernest’s father, Naboukov (Michel Lerousseau), and that it was enacted as an act of revenge against his son for choosing to pursue a life of music rather than following in his father’s footsteps and becoming a judge. There’s also the matter of Ernest’s sister, Mila (Lévanah Solomon), who’s caught in their crossfire, and a mysterious masked vigilante, The EFG, who’s determined to bring music back to Gibberitia. Seeing this Batman-like figure perched on a rooftop, looming menacingly over the people below before breaking out into a killer saxophone solo among the film’s many absurd pleasures.
The film is filled with whimsical flourishes, like the traffic lights that stop pedestrians in their tracks at random moments and Gibberitia’s divorce protocol, which sees a couple’s house physically split in two so that they can continue to live together yet apart. From prison-guard nightsticks with keys hidden inside them to the elaborate network of ziplines that runs throughout the nation, it’s also clear that the filmmakers are working with the same love of mechanisms and mechanical things that powers Miyazaki Hayao’s iconic tales.
In one stunning chase sequence, that zipline network is suddenly transformed into the lines of a musical score, each rider acting as a single note bounding along it. It’s a trick similar to the ones employed in the Spider-Verse films and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: With it, the film is explicitly calling attention to the fact that it’s animated, pulling the picture apart so that we can see the lines and brushstrokes that make it up, and allowing for all sorts of playful possibilities to come piling out. More than anything, this sequence embodies the unique joie de vivre that courses through A Trip to Gibberitia’s every meticulously composed frame.
The first Ernest & Celestine posited a world in which mice and bears lived in separate worlds, segregated from one another by a deep and mutual prejudice until the titular duo brings both sides together. While other animated films like Zootopia have used a similar setup as a direct and rather clumsy metaphor for racism, in Ernest & Celestine it serves more as a more general reminder that you can’t—and shouldn’t—judge a book by its cover.
The moral of A Trip to Gibberitia is similarly simplistic and the relationship between Ernest and his father doesn’t provide the sort of rich intergenerational conflict that animated the likes of Coco and Encanto because Naboukov’s motivations don’t go much deeper than “because I said so.” The only real message underpinning Ernest and Celestine’s second feature is that people should be free to be themselves and that music makes all of our lives a lot more fun.
But even if the story’s sentiments are more nice than nuanced, that doesn’t make them frivolous. Ernest and Celestine are drawn with such tenderness that A Trip to Gibberitia can still be deeply affecting. Rather than the plot’s big climatic moments, it’s the small, quiet ones between the characters that are ultimately the most stirring, like the way that Celestine cuddles Ernest when she’s tired or the frenzied way that the bear charges after her whenever she’s in trouble. At one point in the film, Mila and Ernest sing a song in celebration gibberish, laughing together at its nonsensical lyrics. A Trip to Gibberitia, too, often talks gibberish, but it’s beautifully drawn, achingly lovely gibberish that serves as an endearing ode to the joy of music itself.
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