I like pretty things, and the adverts for FF were pretty. Several times I had assumed I was watching real people, not computer animation. I was quite excited to see what state of the art graphics could offer. Unfortunately the result is "On their own, not much"
The graphics were very pretty, and really quite good, although there was always something not quite right about them: women's hair just didn't work, people walked as if there was a coathanger still in their jackets, and sometimes things just wern't right
But if the rest of the film had the quality of the graphics, I wouldn't mind. I won't moan about the plot - it was passable, a collect these items to win type thing. In good hands it would have made a good basis. unfortunately the dialogue is where the film fell down. We're used to tea-time entertainment having better dialoge than this. There is cerainly no need to reapeat every bit of exposition 3 times. Repeating exposition 3 times is bad. Don't you agree it was wrong of them to repeat every bit of exposition 3 bloody times? I do
The acting is also nothing worth writing home about... voice actors always have it hard... but when there is nothing memorable something has gone wrong. the CGI part of the acting showed a big problem - the fine tuning that is neededto make things really look right was done by the animators... and thus didn't capturwe the skill professional actors have. bad acting means not caring about the characters which leads to overall picking holes int he film rather than watching the story... we can see this from the fact i was always aware the characters were computer generated whereas I happiliy forgot about that for large periods of Toy Story.
The best I can say is this film is a milestone - in 20 years we'll look back and cringe at how poorly we were able to animate humans. If that interests you (it does me) the film is worth seeing. If you would rather save your money and buy a book, "The Eyre Affair" is far more entertaining (and totally unrelated)
I hearby award FF:TSW 1 spirit of nature out of a possible 5. What I want to know is who considered using spirits as the basis functions for wavelet transporms?