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- Released: November 12 2015
- Directed by: Maksim Fadeev
- Running time: 1 h 25 min
- Rating 1/5
Synopsis
A boy named Savva travels the world looking for someone to help him free to his people.
My Thoughts
This movie just…. It’s just so… All over the place, I guess is the best way to say it. It feels unstructured. It feels like it tries to be too many things at once. One way to explain this is by looking at the character designs. Let’s have a look at some of them:
Does… does it look like these all belong in the same movie universe to you? Because to me: no. Some of them look serious and more realistic and pretty good (the wolves, Savva, the Rickies), but then there’s the cartoon-y and goofy as fuck looking comic relief tag-alongs, monkey villain, hyenas, etc. and it just doesn’t work? It’s just very tone deaf.
The humor is done in much of the same way. It’s trying to be an epic animated fantasy movie, which I’m honestly all for. I’d also get it if there was some humor sprinkled in, after all, even Lord of the Rings and Narnia has some comic relief in their movie adaptations. But then there’s this. It just has random comic relief scenes come right out of nowhere or ruin the tone of a more serious scene and it just completely messes up the movie.
Ah well, now, for the story, it’s not too bad. It’s pretty standard for fantasy movie standards, a story about good versus evil and discovering your true self. Honestly I feel like it could’ve worked, but the tonal problems mentioned above just completely botches the execution. It’s also supposed to be this grand reveal at the end where Savva turns out to be the warrior who would save everyone, but it’s so predictable by the way earlier scenes are executed that it doesn’t really feel like a great moment and more like an “oh, yeah, right. Of course it’s him.” moment. We don’t really have anyone else who could possibly fit the role, except for maybe Anggee (the White Wolf prince), but he clearly plays a different role in trying to confront his evil father.
The characters are all very standard. Savva is our main hero who doesn’t make many mistakes and of course goes on his journey of self-discovery. Nothing about his journey really sets him apart from other generic hero-arc characters. There’s also Anggee, who I did enjoy for his design, but his character is rather standard as well. Most of them are, to be honest. There’s also two “dobby-looking motherfuckers” (as I referred to them in my initial liveblog of this movie. They’re called Puffy and Fafl, but who cares, they look like monkey and anthro Dobby respectively), who really just have comic relief. There’s a mosquito king character who is practically pointless throughout the entire film until the climax where they need someone to control the evil monkey queen’s mosquitoes. There’s Nanty, granddaughter of the Shaman. I really didn’t have any opinion on her other than that her voice was very annoying, as it sounded like it was pitched higher. She’s also there to be Love Interest. That’s her role. I’m sure she does some other things, but her main reason for being added is Love Interest.
The villains are, much like the rest, all over the place. We have the much more comedic three-headed monkey queen villain (voiced by Whoopi Goldberg), who honestly doesn’t pose any threat. Nothing about this movie made me afraid for our main characters from what she has them do. Then there’s the more serious villain, Anggee’s father and king of the Rickies. He was more threatening, but I honestly didn’t even remember how they defeated him. He had that little of a presence. Our main villain is the monkey queen. I honestly think it would’ve been much better if we just scrapped Whoopi Goldberg villain or had her be a mini-boss and instead had the Rickie king be the main antagonist. He’s much more threatening and with a proper rewrite could be memorable.
Now for some positives. Because, yeah, surprisingly enough, there actually are some good things in this movie. I already mentioned that some of the character designs aren’t too bad. Savva, the wolves, the Rickies, the dragon and some others are pretty decent actually. The other designs could’ve maybe worked, but in a more cartoon-y movie, and not in this.
The animation also wasn’t bad per se. It’s definitely no Pixar or Disney, but it wasn’t horribly cheap either. Movements were pretty fluid and overall did look okay.
One thing I also love are the background environments. Just look at some of these:
Again, if they were going with the more serious and less tone deaf idea, these really could’ve worked in the context of the movie. I honestly can’t find too many images of these backgrounds, but they look really good.
The voice acting was…eh. Some of it was good or at the very least decent, but the pitched-up female voices on the Shaman’s granddaughter and I think also the Magician was really annoying. Savva also had this permanent somewhat hushed and disinterested tone to his voice, which especially didn’t work since he’s the bloody main character.
The music was okay. Really, nothing about it stood out to me positively, but not in a bad way, either.
The best word one can use to describe this movie if you ask me is: a mess. The story, backgrounds and animation may be pretty good, but the character designs, humor and tone are all over the place and don’t flow together well at all.
I didn’t really have much expectations for this movie going into it. To be frank, the only reason I got into it in the first place was because I just really dug the character designs for the wolves. But yeah, there really is not much else aside from that to appreciate. Maybe the backgrounds, but that’s it. It’s just all over the place and I honestly was just really easily distracted throughout most of the thing because of this problem.
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