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Azur et Asmar (2006)
Why do people like this film?
So I saw this film during the summer (not my decision, by the way)and I have to say, there is so much wrong with this film. I am completely and utterly incredulous of the people who said it was amazing.
First of all, the animation is poor. Very poor. The characters are so stiff most of the time and there is no attention to detail. I feel like I'm watching corpses being dragged around. I think there was only one character that seemed alive at all and he was just some throw-away comedy relief character. Also, the timing is either way too slow or way too fast.
The 3D modelling is boring as hell. Everything just looks so plastic and yucky. The lighting is boring - it's like they just used a single light in the scene and went "finished!".
It also seems like the filmmaker's didn't know how to make storyboards or learn anything about composition because the mise en scene sucks. There are scenes where characters are standing perfectly still in profile view for several minutes at a time for no other reason than that they were too lazy to render out scenes from a different angle. I couldn't even see their facial expressions properly. Everything is framed so lazily and it feels like somebody just threw it together in the last minute.
The music was nothing particularly exceptional. It felt really cheap, like some composer decided "Nevermind - I'll just download some stuff from incompetech" (Actually, I take that back because Incompetech does have some legitimately decent stuff).
The voice acting was not the worst I've heard, but it was pretty bland (oh boy, is this movie bland). Oh, the subtitles - they only translated the parts in french. I don't know if it was intentional to leave out the bits in arabic, but there seemed to be entire scenes in that language. It left the audience pretty confused (except for the ones who knew arabic, of course).
I don't even remember too much of the story to be honest. It was so boring and meandering that I just couldn't care. The characters were unengaging and the dialogue didn't help. Maybe if there were a more talented, more competent group of people to adapt this story, maybe it would work. However we got this and this sucks big time. I'm unashamed of my bias against this film. You need only watch the trailer and just see for yourself the nastiness of the quality.
You know what saddens me even more? The budget for this film was roughly 2.5 million euros higher than 'The Secret of Kells' which is just so mindblowingly beautiful, especially compared to this garbage.
I'm giving it 3 out of ten to be generous.
Sammy's avonturen: De geheime doorgang (2010)
'Twilight' Meets 'Birdemic'
I volunteer at an art-house cinema every weekend and I normally usher at the kids film (mostly because everyone else hates it). I do admit, many of the kids film are mediocre (usually just re-showing a mainstream Hollywood film), but not usually this bad. There was a preview showing of this film on my last shift.
Where do I begin? The writing is absolutely abysmal, shoving a conspicuous environmental message in your face while torturing you with its' one dimensional characters. The characters have no real chemistry; we are told that Ray and Sammy are essentially soul mates and we do spend a lot of screen time with them, but I am not convinced by their relationship whatsoever. The character development in general is totally contrived and it does not enhance the plot (which is sort of the point of characterisation). The plot is boring, unfocused and badly structured, with the protagonists goal changing throughout the duration of the film (and I mean that it randomly changes). It seems that the writer also enjoys using Deus Ex Machina a lot. It doesn't try to emotionally or intellectually engage with its' audience. Rather, it preaches on about how we need to protect our planet, waving the accusatory finger at the children in the audience.
Now, I'm not against its' environmental message; 'WALL-E' had the same theme and it was a masterpiece. The difference here lies in the execution of the idea. 'WALL-E' is well written and does not bully the audience into a certain world-view. It is a plot and character driven story that allows us to emotionally engage with the situation as we absorb the message through osmosis. Its' like the people responsible for 'Sammy's Adventure' put no passion into it and only wanted to tell people to recycle.
In terms of animation, its pretty good. Not as good as what people are making it out to be, though, as it does seem a bit off at times.
Its hard to judge the quality of the voice acting as the version that I saw was a British-English dub (I have no idea why, seeing as it was a word-for-word re-dub of the original) and that version was simply terrible. It was the kind of voice acting I would expect from a straight to DVD rip-off of 'Finding Nemo'. However, I did see a tiny clip of the original dub and the voice acting is a lot better (even if, objectively, it's not anything impressive).
As for the design/overall look of the film, it's pretty...meh. It's nice looking, don't get me wrong. It's just that they are obviously trying to imitate other studios. The style of the film is very bland and boring. It would have been nice to see something a bit more creative. In fact, the credits had some really nice designs and I wonder why they didn't try to make it more like that.
I didn't see it in 3D, so all the scenes in which the 3D gimmicks were supposed to occur were even more distracting and pointless (especially the part with the octopus, which had no bearing on the plot whatsoever).
I surprised by the amount of praise that it is already getting. If this were a big Hollywood movie, it would never be given so much adulation. This film is as tedious to watch as 'Twilight' and as laughably bad as 'Birdemic', which is why I call it "Twilight Meets Birdemic". Now, unlike 'Twilight', it doesn't have a bad message, but if I had kids, I would not take them to see this and spare them the 88 minutes of boredom.
I'm giving this film a 2 out of 10 because the animation is the only thing redeeming about it.