This is a nice, modest little piece. Lotte Reiniger, the pioneering jointed-silhouette animator, casts such a long pardon-the-pun shadow that this is not only homage, but, inescapably, a derivative. Still, it’s confidently and really capably executed, and these young people really bring some of their own to the party. The bookends are pretty cool, especially as you see the young people planning out and then preparing to participate in the actual stories. They do research, right there on screen. The various stories add up to some pretty familiar, pretty conventional kids’ stuff, of course, but it’s a benevolent familiar. The princess and the diamonds is a very pretty tale indeed, a worthy, principled, even kind of touching pastiche of all sorts of familiar folk things. The last one extends the frog prince scenario in a ridiculously, amusingly excessive way.