Strong and Moving!

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

In some ways this is a combination between Epic, itself a 3D animation movie about entering a feudal fantasy world that is of a different size than our own, and Star Wars, from where a lot of the ideas were blatantly appropriated. I could criticize a lot of things about the film, but I won't. The bottom line is that I actually enjoyed most of it. What does it harm is actually the animation.You may have seen other comments of mine where I dismiss the importance of animation style if the artistic vision is good enough. But with such a cliché plot and with a designer such a Moebius, anyone would expect a lot more from this film. As such, it becomes a barely average family movie, an attempt to copy the success of American animation films. You may think "why not? Americans remake everything they see making money in other countries.", but it works for them. Europeans want substance, are used to interesting stories and have no idea what PG-13 means. And you know the story of the copy of the copy of the copy, after all.Conclusion: for a story about a teen from the future going through a portal to an alien planet to look for his father and falling into a feudal intrigue between two factions of giants, the film was ridiculously mild. I half expected them to burst into song at the end of the film. The 3D animation is caught between interesting world design and really shoddy technical implementation, but it's mostly bad and uninspiring. The result is average at most and truly not a 7, but just a bit more than 6, which for me is a failure.

I have been following this one for a while because I knew Michael Dorn is in it and I finally got a chance to catch it during the Hong Kong FilmMart. I have always known that Mark Hamill has done a lot of voices for animation (and his work here is excellent as usual) but after reading the messages here I just have to say this for the record: Michael Dorn's performance in the movie is great! And I don't find the evil king character animated to his voice overacting at all... in fact it's done very well. In general, I like the non-human characters better (same feeling for Shrek2... I find the animation for Fairy Godmother and Prince Charming somewhat odd compared to say Shrek or the Cat). Even if you are not a Trekkie like me there to see (sorry, hear) Mr. Dorn, you will like this one. The story has a timely anti-war theme and the worlds and characters created by Moebius for this movies are just amazing.

I saw the focus group screen test in Hollywood on April 4, together with over 300 kids and their parents. The Moebius's design look great and I like the story. The kids love the animation, the landscape and the characters design are out of this world. The audience is very enthusiastic and they all applauded at the end of film!! I stayed behind with the focus group, to listen to what they like and don't like about the movie and the kids really love it. The focus group describe the color is so vibrant and the ANIMATION - which was almost universally described as "revolutionary," "unlike anything they've ever seen", "feels 3-D", "seemed real in places", "puffed out" The action of the battle scenes, fighting and chase scenes fully impressed them. The movie carry a positive massage of family unity and payback for the bad guy.The audience that i chat with really like it and they said they will highly recommend to other as well.I think the movie will become a classic for CG animation and I applauded the people who bring this on the big screen for us.

With names like Mark Hamill of Star Wars and Michael Dorn of Star Trek, and the unique images of the French cartoonist, Moebius, I was really looking forward to seeing this animation. But alas, it was my one greatest disappointment during my film hopping at Cannes 2004. Once you can get past the over the top acting, and line deliveries that made ones skin crawl, there was still the pathetic comedy moments that in itself was comical to witness how really really really badly it was executed. For budding animators/film makers, this is one to study as an academic would study Ed Wood films from the 50s. I'll give credit to the sets, which were quite spectacular in some instances - I usually don't notice these sort of things in movies, but seeing how bored I was I guess my eyes wondered to the least displeasing thing, the background. If you hate someone enough, tell them to watch this one. Or, perfect as a drive-in movie with a hot date!