Ainbo: Spirit of the Amazon (not rated)
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This is an international co-production of Peru, the Netherlands, and Germany, but I mainly think of it as Peruvian. However, the language I watched it in was English, which I think is the original language, for some reason. But of course I could be mistaken. Anyway, it's set in the Amazon, as the title suggests. There's a 13-year-old girl named Ainbo, who comes from a village (or civilization?) called Candámo, and she wants to become a great hunter. She never knew her parents, but was raised by a tribal elder named Chuni, who is also the caretaker of Ainbo's best friend, Zumi, who is the daughter of the tribe's chief, Huarinka. When the movie starts, Ainbo is out hunting alone, but gets caught in one of her own traps. One of Candámo's hunters, Atok, finds her and leaves her there, because he has a grudge against her that will be explained later in the film. However, after Atok leaves, two spirit animals show up: an armadillo named Dillo and a tapir named Vaca, and they free Ainbo. She hurries back to the village, because she doesn't want to miss the ceremony where Huarinka passes on leadership to Zumi. Ainbo plans to present the spirit animals to Zumi, but they don't show up, and no one believes she met any spirit animals.

Oh, I've forgotten to say that there's supposedly a curse on the village. People are getting sick and dying, as are all the fish in the river. Huarinka himself is sick, which I think is why he was passing the mantle of leadership to his daughter... but then again, it sounds like he was made leader when he was the same age as her, 13, so maybe that's just a tradition. I don't know. Anyway, Chuni begins to tell Ainbo about Ainbo's late mother, Lizeni, who could also see spirit animals. She promises to tell Ainbo more in the morning, so the next day Ainbo wakes up Zumi to have her come listen to Chuni's story with her, but unfortunately, they find Chuni dead. Atok believes it's Ainbo who is responsible for the curse, and she runs away. He decides to chase her, against Zumi's orders. In the jungle, Ainbo meets Dillo and Vaca again, and learns that they can help her sometimes, but not all the time, because she has a quest to complete, to find a way to end the curse. And... that gets complicated. I don't want to get into all the details, but it involves meeting a couple of different animal deities or giant spirits or whatever, and also involves Lizeni's spirit, which resides in Ainbo's favorite tree. She also comes across a group of white people with big machines who are mining and/or logging, I dunno. Later, Atok meets the head of the operation, Cornell DeWitt, who is supposedly a botanist who creates cures for diseases like malaria, and Atok brings him back to the village. DeWitt also wants to know where he can find gold. And it turns out that he's actually possessed by an evil spirit called Yacuruna. He's apparently the one who's actually responsible for the curse, though I wasn't really clear on that. I kind of got the impression the "curse" might have been all the pollution from the white men's machines, but I don't know. I think the movie's supposed to have some kind of ecological moral, but mostly I just saw it as a mythical adventure story.

Anyway, I don't want to say exactly how it all ends, but of course there's a happy ending. And there are some surprising developments with a couple of different characters. I'm not sure what else to say, except that I generally liked the animation. I thought some elements of the writing were a bit weak, especially the humor. But it is a kids' movie, so maybe young children would like it more than I did. But I'm glad to have seen it, even if I don't feel the need to ever watch it again.