Review: Dalia and the Red Book is pleasant, but not a page-turner

I used to be such an avid reader. There were a couple years when I was reading at least a book a week. Fiction, non-fiction, YA, kids' books, any genre. I was voracious. I think part of it was that, at the time, I was also pursuing a career in writing. I moved to LA with a dream to write movies, a dream that I no longer have. Not in a sad way. My life has just changed and evolved. So have I. My mom often chides me for not reading like I used to. But I'm trying to get back into it. I just finished reading a book last week, and started another one. Maybe there's hope for me yet.

Dalia and the Red Book is about the power of the written word, both from the reader's and the writer's perspective. It favors the writer a bit more, as the eponymous Dalia is the daughter of a writer, and wants to be one herself. After venturing into her late father's study, the plucky twelve-year-old finds his unfinished manuscript, one that he worked on for years, one she's never laid eyes on before. She hopes to read it, to find some closure, maybe to help her feel closer to her father. While he was alive, they were inseparable, two of a kind, cut from the same cloth. But she feels like she'll never be the writer her was, as desperately as she wants to be.

She isn't the only one with her eye on this tome. The characters within the book, frustrated that their story still hasn't ended, have decided to take matters into their own hands. They wander the forlorn cityscape within the book's pages scheming, plotting. Eventually, they find a door to the real world, and soon enough, Dalia finds herself in the world of the book, where only she can help craft the ending that can let these characters rest.

I dig this plot. It makes me think of some of the defining movies of my childhood, like The Pagemaster and Magic in the Mirror, a movie about giant ducks that scarred me like no other movie ever has. The story, along with the movie's cute visuals, was a big reason this movie has been on my radar for quite a while. As soon as I heard about it, I was scrambling to get a screener, but never managed to. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the movie quietly dropped on VOD. You can go rent it on Amazon or wherever now for five bucks. It's funny how the world works.

(So much of the time, when these smaller international animated movies make it to the US, only the English dub is available. I was pleased that that wasn't the case here. On Amazon, at least, I was able to watch this in its original Spanish. Kudos for that!)

While the narrative set-up here is solid, and does a nice job of building intrigue and mystery in its early scenes, the movie sadly doesn't quite have the chops to carry it through. It feels a little under-baked story-wise, ironically (or appropriately?) enough. One of the biggest issues is that we never really get a sense of what this story was supposed to be. What was Dalia's dad writing about? Who are these characters in this world outside of this current quest? How do they know each other, what are their goals, etc. etc.? We're plopped, alongside Dalia, into an endless, repetitive cityscape that lacks texture or character. The pages of the dad's manuscript are full of doodles and scribbles, not really telling us much.

It made me think of a note I got on my first feature screenplay back in my college days, a meta rom-com where the characters in the movie became self-aware and took over the plot (yeah, we all have the same ideas). My teacher at the time told me that a piece was missing from my script: we never got to see what the Screenwriter (a character in my script -- so clever, no?) intended the movie to look like. It was a pretty easy note to address, and one that ended up really opening up my script, making it sing. I'm still really proud of it.

So, without that kind of context here, it feels like the characters aren't really moving toward anything, just some undefined "ending" that will let the characters know peace, and allow Dalia to return home. The engine is running on fumes.

It fares better thematically, following Dalia's journey to embrace her own voice rather than trying to replicate her father's. She should rely on her simple words, and give herself room to grow, rather than aping other, more experienced writers. It's nothing terribly deep or surprising, but it's done well, and certainly resonates more than the surface-level story it's trapped within.

While the book's characters feel a bit like unmoored boats, I do have to give mad props to Wolf, who is so tall and cool and sexy and probably will awaken something in someone (me). She (almost textually) awakened something in Dalia's dad. She's such a badass, towering over everyone else, wearing cool armor, brandishing two swords. She's amazing. I want a video game where I play as her. It should be a crime to serve so much.

The rest of the cast has their charms, too. Dalia is a great protagonist, upbeat and curious and sweet. She's teamed with Goat, a character who she planted the seed for in her childhood days, based on her favorite stuffed animal. He's very cool, the silent and brooding type, with horns that look like lizards (idk how else to explain them) and a nifty hammer/staff weapon.

Again, I don't know why these anthropomorphized animals have or need these weapons, because the dad's book is an enigma, but at least the adventure Dalia has with them is pleasant, peppy, and goes down easy. It's not destined to be a best-seller, but its well-worn pages contain their fair share of delights.