Just not all that great of a movie.Definitely interesting to watch, and important to the medium of animated film, but not interesting enough to keep itself afloat.
Being in black and white, and done in the style that it is, it's impossible to avoid comparisons to Sin City. However, it is simply not done with the same skill as Sin City was. The fact that it does not employ real actors evokes memories from the film release of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, when all the local news shows had reports about how outstanding the animation was, and how it looked like real people. This movie may have been better executed, at least visually speaking, by the folks that made that movie. The animation is quite remarkable, and at times looks beautiful, and almost lifelike. However, when the close-ups of the characters begin and you start seeing serious conversations between the protagonists, you begin to feel like you're watching cut scenes from a video game. The sharp brightness of eyes against an otherwise completely shadowed face, a visual tactic used quite a few times in Sin City, is also utilized here, though not nearly as well. The unrealistic boundaries from eye to face become even more obvious when truly featured, and really does become quite distracting.
The only color used in the movie, shown in drawings done by someone who I think has some kind of brain damage (I sort of stopped paying attention after a while), look like Facebook graffiti, being speedily drawn with neither an artist nor a tool. It really just wasn't that interesting.I have waited for quite a while for a great, serious, animated movie, and was hoping this would be a good one. For all I know, there may be one already, 2D or 3D, but I have yet to see it.
In short, it looks too damn fake to be taken seriously, and the plot and dialogue are just not interesting enough to watch all the way through. The unforgiving shadows and almost complete lack of grayscale again brings to mind the look of Sin City, but when mixed with the unrealistically smooth movements of the computer animated people and the bizarre look of the moving mouths and faces, it becomes fake and distracting.
2/5.
Though I didn't like it that much, and seeing the way in which the characters moved and spoke sort of destroys the illusions, it really is an interesting style that the movie is done in, and quite cool to look at, for at least a few minutes. Kind of like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. That movie blew, but I still have the VHS copy my dad got at a garage sale, since the first twenty minutes are interesting to watch, before it begins attempting to have a plot.
Anyway, this review was short, and I downloaded way more pictures than I had room for.
So here they are anyway.
