A poor job of world-building undermines this French-Spanish animated effort, about an insomniac orphan who discovers a world of creatures working at night to make sure we sleep. It’s an intriguing idea, but developed with very little logic. Some of the “work” being done would induce sleep (mimicking the noise of crickets), some of it would actually wake you up (a “concert” of banging shutters and scratching twigs) and some of it is the sort of stuff that just happens to take place at night (a trio of hairdressers giving kids bedhead). Equally inconsistent are the character designs. A few of the fantastical beings are vaguely reminiscent of animals, others of humans and still others of robots. Just about all are uncomfortably uncanny. I don’t need my cartoon characters to be cute (I’m a fan of Hayao Miyazaki, who somehow makes the inexplicably strange feel wondrous), but there’s a certain haphazardness to the animation in Nocturna that kept me at a distance.
