There’s much to like about Mavka: The Forest Song. This being the Oleh Malamuz and Oleksandra Ruban directed Ukrainian animation that is currently enjoying a limited but UK wide cinema release. Based on a 1918 play by poet Lesya Ukrainka, the film unites folkish mythos with a more pointed contemporary resonance. If that element wisps over the heads of Mavka’s target audience, a call for unity and message of hope should at least land rather nicely.

A dedication to the Slavic cultural heritage is chief among the film’s pleasures. While Mavka herself is largely distanced from the sprite of lore – who had a penchant for tickling men to death – the film around her boasts a patchwork of artistic lineage. This pervades all from the hyperlocality of the traditional clothing worn by the film’s village stock to the patterned interlocking of the farmed fields around them.

Nature is, too, central here. A charming sequence early in the film finds Mavka (voiced, in English, by Laurie Hymes) awaken the Spring from its Winter slumber. Remarkably well realised water rushes through the dried out valley, as a rush of floral beauty bursts into life on the banks beside. There’s something of the Pochantonas as vibrant leaves swirl up with the wind. Such is a reference point that only grows with the arrival of Eddy Lee’s Lukas into the forest and Mavka’s heart.

It is through Lukas’ naivety that the film best channels its thinly veiled allegories to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A gentle soul, Lukas is catnip to the whims of dictatorial oligarch Kylina (Sarah Natochenny), who offers high wealth in return for a helping hand in her will to take back the heart of the forest. Not that Lukas knows this. It’s a plot reminiscent of Disney’s Tangled that sends the young hero in search of a magical leaf with miraculous healing capabilities. Read from this that Mavka yarns the story of a heinous villain who reframes their entirely personal vendetta as an ideological crusade for the benefit of all. On the ground itself, Lukas will learn that there is more that unites him with his neighbours than divides. It’s a story that will ring as true to Ukrainian citizens as many a Russian soldier on the front line.

In stepping back to an arcane past, as a means of navigating an uncertain future, Malamuz and Ruban remind of the late nineteenth-century Finnish Romanticism, an art movement at a time the Finns too sought to consolidate their unique cultural identity in the face of Russian influence. As such, Mavka draws not solely on Ukraine’s visual heritage but equally on the country’s oral traditions. Contemporary beats bring lush montage segues to life but it is the time afforded guttural throat singing and Lukas’ fluted lullabies that gifts the film its more specialist sense of character.

The animation itself is a blend of the stunning and synthetic. Far greater effort is poured into the forest world than its human counterpart, with the result rendering the contrast somewhat stark. Splendid design work roars aplenty in the forest. Certainly, an inverted tree with antler moustache and scuttling stump with lobster legs prove particularly memorable. The village folk, by contrast, tend to wobble. Both halves suffer equally, however, from occasional bouts of over-saturation. At times, the deployment of colour here does rather sore the eye. This may yet please any tots in the auditorium, who will surely be swept up in Mavka’s enchanting embrace.