I love this because I feel, to a degree, that this is the best argument for what animation is for: creating an entire unique world that no amount of special effects and actors could bring out in a live-action movie (how close were the Star Wars prequels to being animation anyway?).
It's one of those fantastic child imaginations that go into worlds anachronistic and improbable, one that has airships powered by coal and dusty sultry air with islands floating amidst them, that have no real basis in real physical being but still has scientists and its own set of rules.
The imagination is very richly animated in a weird sort of 3-D/2-D way, where the majority of the world definitely has an optical illusion of three dimensions but the characters are simply silhouettes constantly moving in two variable directions. It's pretty unique and at first it's hard to distinguish just what kind of animation it is... if it's just the silhouettes shot on cells of paintings, if there's CGI, if the backgrounds are thus animated. It becomes pretty clear from a lot of the movements that it is, actually, CGI, but still, it's very rich and painterly. It's a definite argument to the artistry of animation that can be created when involving a lot of creative approaches to a time-consuming and difficult field.
My only problem with it is that it's about as anticlimactic as any other surviver-journal story. We spend our entire times following a narrator who eventually throws it up in the air over whether he even survives or succeeds on his adventure. It's an interesting cliffhanger... maybe the first time you're introduced to such a story. But it gets tiresome after a while and one has to really question if it's worth it to really bother sometimes.
--PolarisDiB
It's one of those fantastic child imaginations that go into worlds anachronistic and improbable, one that has airships powered by coal and dusty sultry air with islands floating amidst them, that have no real basis in real physical being but still has scientists and its own set of rules.
The imagination is very richly animated in a weird sort of 3-D/2-D way, where the majority of the world definitely has an optical illusion of three dimensions but the characters are simply silhouettes constantly moving in two variable directions. It's pretty unique and at first it's hard to distinguish just what kind of animation it is... if it's just the silhouettes shot on cells of paintings, if there's CGI, if the backgrounds are thus animated. It becomes pretty clear from a lot of the movements that it is, actually, CGI, but still, it's very rich and painterly. It's a definite argument to the artistry of animation that can be created when involving a lot of creative approaches to a time-consuming and difficult field.
My only problem with it is that it's about as anticlimactic as any other surviver-journal story. We spend our entire times following a narrator who eventually throws it up in the air over whether he even survives or succeeds on his adventure. It's an interesting cliffhanger... maybe the first time you're introduced to such a story. But it gets tiresome after a while and one has to really question if it's worth it to really bother sometimes.
--PolarisDiB