So I saw this movie here. And at the beginning of it was kind of like the beginning of Indigo Prophecy - visually alluring, evocative and vaguely prophetic.
Unfortunately, the ending was kind of like the ending of Indigo Prophecy - somewhere along the way, someone just changed their mind about what the story was about.
What starts as a man's magically realistic search for his memory subtly fades into a docudrama and then not-so subtly fades into a guilt trip. And for no good reason. It's just senselessly dissonant storytelling. The only reason it got the Globe was because of the sheer foreignness of it, and the soothingly lyrical Hebrew dialogue.
After a while, I just stopped paying attention to the story and decided to pay attention to the animation itself. The shot of the dog running at the screen from the trailer is one of the first things you see in the movie. At first it's striking, but the shot lasts a while. After staring long enough, I realized that the shot wasn't really truly animated - it was just a bunch of still images oscillating over each other to give the illusion of animation.
There are more than a few shortcuts like that throughout the movie. Looped animations pop up a lot, especially in crowd scenes. And while character's lip movements and facials tics are actually really fluid, simple acts like lifting a drinking glass look jerky.
This is not to say that Nix's rants on digital animation have been entirely true. They animators are obviously talented and generate a bunch of really dreamy, engaging visual ideas. Unfortunately, most of them are right in the trailer.
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