TIFF 2026 | Movie Review: There Is Just As Much To Admire About "Long Long Night" As There Is To Dislike About It
Long Long Night is a rare animated film where parents would get most enjoyment out of it. Kids might like the middle section where it resembles Ice Age; teens might enjoy the Lion King-esque adventure story; but only parents, I think, will find profundity throughout the whole movie.
The Korean production is based on a best-selling children’s book. It eliminated a lot of conversations in the book in favor of visual storytelling, and indeed the movie is colorful and lively. The graphics will no doubt be called outdated or cheap, but I enjoyed looking at its roughness—it reminds me of how much work animation is and how much effort is put into it. And let’s be honest: Pixar and the Spider-Verse movies have spoiled us into believing top-tier animation should be the norm. As we learned from the “live-action” Lion King remake, a movie starring animals that looks too perfect can be an awful ordeal.
The story: Norden is a rhino and one of the last of his kind enjoying peace and serenity when one day poachers attack his friends and chop his horn down. A brutal sequence shows an attack perpretrated by violent, faceless humans. This is quite a heavy theme for a children’s movie, which makes its tonal shifts bizarre and counterproductive to its message. Norden pairs up with a hyperactive penguin, one of those animals in cartoons that runs and jumps and falls every moment they are on screen. If this section is meant to be funny, I wasn’t quite amused by it, since looking at Norden’s missing horn is enough to distract from any supposed amusement.
A while after the journey the movie reveals Norden’s actual arc. The penguin hatches an egg, which gives birth to a new companion Norden has to take care of. The parental subtext of the film can spawn a great story of its own, but in this movie it comes a few beats too late, after it tired itself with a squeaky penguin and multiple action scenes.
I can’t quite recommend the movie, because although it is good-natured, it plays like a pastiche of better, more cohesive animated films. At best I find it entertaining, lovely to look at, but not quite profound, which the music and narration tells me is how I am supposed to find it.
Acting/Casting 1 | Visual effects/Editing 2 | Story/Message 1 | Entertainment Value 1 | Music score/Soundtrack 1 | Reviewer's Preference 1 | What does this mean?