Inspector Sun and the Curse of the Black Widow

Entertaining but forgettable, this Spanish animated production is sort of a "Bugs" universe with an Agatha Christie whodunit plot.

It can be harder and harder to tell the difference between a high-budget Hollywood animated film and ones made more cheaply and/or overseas. Like most technological innovation, first the quality gets better and then it becomes less expensive for everyone. (Until the next qualitative leap, that is.)

We’re in a period right now where a picture like “Inspector Sun and the Curse of the Black Widow,” a Spanish production, looks nearly as good as something from the Disney and Sony animation arms, at least upon first glance. It’s got vivid CGI details, solid character design and smooth, pleasing action scenes.

The storytelling’s not up to snuff, though, and the voice cast is not exactly A-list… no offense to Ronny Chieng (“Crazy Rich Asians”), who provides the voice of the title character. (Like a lot of animated movies seeking an international audience, they used different voice casts for the Spanish and English versions.)

Sort of an Agatha Christie whodunit set against the backdrop of a “Bugs” type universe where all the characters are insects, arachnids or other creepy-crawlies, “Inspector Sun” is fast-paced and modestly entertaining, clocking in at a breezy 88 minutes. Its primary audience is obviously kids age about 12 and under, I’d say.

It’s fun and family-friendly, but forgettable.

Set in Shanghai circa 1934, Sun (Chieng) is a foppish police detective who only has his job because his uncle is the chief. For some reason he dresses in fancy clothes and bow tie instead of cop uniform, complete with cane, fine manners and pencil mustachios, sort of a Thin Man type. He’s a huntsman spider, and his motto is that he only hunts alone.

The running joke is that Sun is not actually particularly smart or good at detecting, but just very lucky and amiable. As the story opens he manages to capture his nemesis, Red Locust (Rich Orlow), the head of a criminal syndicate swarm. Locust was responsible for an earlier encounter in which Sun lost one of his eight legs, though he doesn’t seem too bothered about it.

Finally let go from the police force for the large collateral damage incurred during Locust’s arrest, Sun decides to take a vacation and winds up on the wrong plane to San Francisco, where he runs into old friend Scarab (also voiced by Orlow), a rhinoceros beetle with some law enforcement background who’s now muscle for the captain, Skeleton (Iain Batchelor), an easily-irritated fly.

He’s also joined by stowaway Janey (Emily Kleimo), an eager young jumping spider who’s convinced she’s destined to be Sun’s apprentice. He keeps putting her off but eventually allows her tag along, where she quickly proves a more able investigator than he.

The second half of the title refers to Arabella Obscuri, a black widow spider voiced by Jennifer Childs Greer who’s recently married her 14th husband — her spouses tending to expire shortly after the nuptials. Of course, her new guy, a scientist named Dr. Bugsy Spindlethorp, follows this same pattern during their long flight. (He’s voiced by Greer’s real-life husband, Scott.)

All signs point to Arabella, who’s got that vampy femme fatale vibe, but Sun and Janey have reason to believe some other bug is behind it all. A number of suspects present themselves, including the Ant Queen, whose multitudinous worker minions act as stewards on the plane, and Lady Vatchu, a huffy, vaguely caterpillar-like Slavic type carting around a carriage of her larval spawn (both voiced by Jeanette Grace Gonglewski).

There’s also a surly cockroach, who has a chip on his, uh, carapace about the way his type gets treated by the other bugs, and a mantis with the totally non-leading name of Gill Tea (Paul Louis Miller).

You can figure how things go: lots of double-crosses, suspicions that turn out to be wrong and clues leading the inspector and his sidekick in all sorts of circular directions before winding up right about where we expect.

I liked how the bug world exists right alongside the human one, with insects and their kin just assumed to go anywhere homo sapiens do. There’s even a separate, formal entrance to the plane next to the human one for all the many-legged folk to board.

The 1930s style, from clothing to music and furnishings, is also a nice touch, reminding me a bit of the opening sequence to “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” Oddly, all the spiders produce webbing from their foreleg/hands rather than their hindquarters, just like Spider-Man.

“Inspector Sun” is a decent piece of filmmaking, more ambitious in its look than its narrative. One thing you can’t achieve solely through technology is the ability to spin a good yarn — and in this respect Hollywood animation still remains several steps ahead of their upstart competition.