This is
another nice and lively tale from the Irish film company Cartoon Saloon that has also given us suggestive animations based on Irish myths, such as Wolfwalkers and The Song of the Sea.
But here we are far from the green island - in dusty and miserable neighborhoods in Afghanistan's capital Kabul.
Parvana is 11 years old and leads, together with her family, a miserable and strongly controlled existence where violence and death can affect those who choose the wrong words or dress incorrectly.
The worst is, as is well known, for women who are completely powerless and according to the Taliban decree are not allowed to leave home without being escorted by a husband or brother.
When the father is
thrown in jail - he has broken the ban which says that girls are not allowed to be taught - the family is suddenly without support and without the opportunity to go out shopping.
Like his distant, animated cousin Mulan, Parvana sees no other option than to dress up as a boy, in order to visit the market.
Unlike Mulan, she does it out of necessity, not to save the family's honor.
Here it is instead the Taliban who talk about honor, while they themselves behave like pigs.
The animations are, as the term suggests, soulful and give a paradoxically fresh fan from the old hand-drawn school, but The Invisible Girl still does not have quite the same luminosity as the above-mentioned sibling films, but it tells of gloomier circumstances that can not be played away by atmospheric mythology.
Paravana's fight for his father, and against the Taliban, instead offers a fine-tuned pathos and a straightforward tension that is bound to captivate the younger audience.
A children's film demands a happy ending, but in a country ruled by fundamentalists there are none, so hope is instead found in the story that Parvana tells her little brother, and which is illustrated with rock puppet technique, to dispel everyday worries.
The invisible girl
contains some nasty things, the mother is beaten and the father rots in the finch and some of the Taliban have murders in their eyes but all violence takes place outside the picture so the age limit that Netflix * has set at 13 years is excessively high, and should probably mostly be seen as a weekend guard against possible criticism from worried parents.
On the other hand, now that Cartoon Saloon is drawing an animated lance for those who are trampled by the sandals of fundamentalism, as an adult one can expect some tricky questions from the little ones about the state of affairs in a cruel and difficult-to-explain world.
* Swedish cinema premiere at Folkets cinema on January 15, but the film is from 2017 and is already available on Netflix. Anyone who wants a long quality session in Cartoon Saloon's company can watch Wolfwalkers on Apple TV + and Havets sang on Cmore or SF Anytime.