Paper Planes *** (2014, Ed Oxenbould, Sam Worthington, Julian Dennison, David Wenham, Terry Norris, Deborah Mailman) – Movie Review

Co-writer/director Robert Connolly’s Aussie children’s film is sweet, charming, likeable, touching – and just plain darned nice.

That’s a hard trick to pull off these days, and so is its story about a young Australian boy’s passion for flight and his challenge to compete in the World Paper Plane Championships in Japan. There’s a World Paper Plane Championship? Really?

But, with his heart on his sleeve, and a bunch of game, talented actors, he succeeds. It’s quite a retro movie. It could easily have been made in the Eighties, or even the Fifties. But that’s fine.

Robert Connolly manages to tap into his young star Ed Oxenbould’s talent, sidestepping his show-off side that made him so annoying in the M Night Shayamalan horror pic The Visit (2015). Oddly, in both films the kid has phobias – that one of germs and this one of needles – that he is going to have to overcome on the way to manhood.

The film’s centre and heart turns out to be, not the paper planes, but the relationship between the boy and his dad (Sam Worthington), who is still suffering a meltdown after the death of the mother five months earlier in a car crash. The kid is father to the man in the picking it up and starting all over again stakes, and is incredibly wise for his 12 years of age in the ways of man.

That probably says more about a middle-aged movie director than a 12-year-old boy, but still, it is so toe-curlingly sweet and nice, it’s hard to resist. Kids should love it and most adults will like it too, except the Scrooge types, of course. For such a big Aussie bloke, Worthington makes a lovely job of seeming sensitive, for this is a grown man crying type of film, a bit of a challenge for an actor, I’d say.

The boy faces hostility from a school bully, his chief rival, the spoiled win-at-all-costs Jason Jones (Nicholas Bakopoulos-Cooke) and problems with raising the cash to go to Tokyo, and later distraction from Japanese paper plane champion Kimi (Ena Imai). But his feisty grandpa (Terry Norris) and his new schoolpal Kevin (Julian Dennison) have got his back.

With a story loosely based on a 2009 episode of Australian Story (a national weekly documentary series, produced and broadcast on ABC Television) called Fly With Me, it is the highest grossing Australian children’s film in history, grossing just under grossed A$10million at the Australian box office.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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