This Ukrainian animated feature offers a bricolage of tropes from a wide range of children’s stories; mostly these derive from other movies but there’s a strong, proper folk-story spine in there too. Forest sprite protagonist Mavka (voiced in the English version by Laurie Hymes) is a fetchingly designed ingenue with green hair, disproportionally large doe eyes and magical healing skills, who lives in a part of the forest where humans no longer go, thanks to an old treaty between them and the forest spirits. But wealthy villainess Kalina wants to acquire an elixir from a magic tree in the forest that keeps her from ageing, so she sends a guileless young musician hunk named Lucas in to the forest to find it – and he promptly makes friends/falls in love with Mavka.

Very loosely based on Lesya Ukrainka’s 1911 play The Forest Song, all this is very much in the tradition of Rapunzel by way of Disney’s Tangled, with a big dash of Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, while the animal sidekicks – such as cat-frog Swampy and a mobile tree spirit/talking log named Frol – are like fractionally cuter versions of the genetically engineered abominations from The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Squint very, very hard and you might be able to divine an allegory in there about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Kalina representing Russian aggressors who only want to strip the forest of its resources. The local peasants, unusually for these sort of films, are very much coded as being from a specific country, what with their red and white traditional Ukrainian dress and tendency to break into throat singing when the mood takes them.

Towards the end, Mavka must access a spark of rage – a literal spark, in fact – and it’s this fury that she kindles that gives her the strength to match the powers of the invaders. OK, so the spark isn’t shaped like a cluster bomb or an M1 Abrams battle tank, but the parallels between Mavka and the Zelenskiy regime, discovering inner combative resilience with help from outside agents, is just there on the table, waiting to be parsed.

The colour palette is eye-searingly hypersaturated and viewers over the age of eight may consider this a mildly offensive weapon in itself. However, the character animation and movement are thoughtful and well done. Most importantly, the music is lovely, especially the Ukrainian songs – because who doesn’t love a bit of throat singing?

• This article was amended on 3 August 2023 to add information that the film is loosely based on Lesya Ukrainka’s 1911 play The Forest Song.

• Mavka: The Forest Song is released on 28 July in UK and Irish cinemas.