We Are The Strange

25 October 2009, 21:35 | ,

One upon a time, there was a game nobody played. These are the opening words from M dot Strange’s We Are The Strange, which I found and watched recently. I was compelled to write this review after watching it, because the movie was made using a process that the director calls “str8nime,” which is a pretentious way of saying a mix of simple CG and stop motion animation. This is my review to the movie about the game that nobody played…
[This review contains plenty of spoilers]

In the first moments of the movie, the audience is treated to a video game themed prologue that will leave you wondering why M. dot Strange didn’t just show all this back story during the movies hour and a half run time. This thought is reinforced for the rest of the film, where you will sit through long, confusing shots between stilted character models, rarely broken up by fun, fast-paced fight scenes.

Stop motion is a tricky medium; the problem many animators face with stop motion is the lack of expressiveness in the face of the models, which leads most to use more body movement. Unfortunately, even the 3D characters in this movie lack any sort of expressiveness, having fixed emotions on their faces throughout the film. This would lead us to believe that the voice will carry the characters, but not so. For the characters who do speak (instead of annoying squeaks like the doll boy) dialogue is kept to a minimum, which is probably a good thing, as it is often overly cliche and laughable at points.

The whole film seems like it was made to facilitate anime-like fight scenes, which, when mixed with the 8bit video game look, works rather well. The fast pace works much better with the director’s style than the rest of the film, where the video game graphics overlaid onto the scene don’t make as much sense, and seem forced at times. The anime themes get put in as well; Giant Robots, a brooding mystery character, and a blue-haired female.

In the end, the story and characters are just too simple and poorly developed to justify an hour and a half run time. The entire look of the film is comprised from out-of-the-box CG effects, and stop motion that is often difficult to read. It looks like a digital effects student trying to hide a really weak story under a very stylized but poorly designed aesthetic. Besides all that, I do hope to see more work from this director, but in smaller, more polished pieces. My suggestion? Go watch M dot Strange’s Mindless Self Indulgence music video ; The characters are more animated, the shots and editing is more polished, and the overall concept is much better executed. You will even recognize most of the graphics and environments are borrowed from movie (or could it be the other way around?). It’s also only 3 minutes long.

Share |

Comment