yeolit

This is a film that on the surface looks like a storyline that borrows from "Spirited Away", and delves into the theme of fantasy, but once you cross a few thresholds of the movie you will likely start to realise that it is not so simple.

The visuals are absolutely stunning, I think they are even better than a lot of the famous studios out there like Studio Ghilbi, because of how the liquid threads and light speckles were portrayed, and there is a very advanced level of artistry in there, even though some parts of it look quite close to Spirited Away scenes. But rest assured that most of it is on its own, and the storyline is far deeper as well.

Without giving spoilers, I would like to say that this is a very tearjerking movie, especially near the end, and I like how they connected various parts of the "fantasy" back to real life, and suddenly some things made sense. Some other things have to be understood on hindsight, or from a second watch onwards, like a good book.

The storyline, while being fantastic and quite coherent by the end of the movie, made me confused as I was watching the front of it. There were so many things not explained, but the storyline goes rushing along new ideas and plotlines, thus it diminished the understanding of what was going on a little. Luckily, most of the early to mid movie scenes centered on still light-hearted themes,so thinking about the plotline was not that necessary. The connection between the early/mid to the back was done a bit abruptly though, so the transition could have been done better.

The ending of the film left me in deep thoughts about my life, and I start to wonder if I am in similar situations at time, extrapolated and not literally of course. Like a fine wine, this movie will be better as time passes and I understand the true essence of this movie. But for a first viewing and immediate review, this movie is one of my favourite already.

Yes, the overarching feature is talking dogs, which is usually filled with themes of heartwarming tales and tear-jerking moments.

Replace those with dirty jokes and P****-jerking moments and you get Strays.

Seeing as how the team who made this film did Ted, yeah one can expect some pretty mature stuff. It' just that the story plot is really cliched and boring at a lot of junctures. A lot of the jokes seem very typical, especially when it comes to alcohol, 'on a high' and sex jokes.

Also, there were quite a lot of moments where the heartwarming moments and inspirational speeches were quite cheesy, it is sort of copy and paste from many movies and putting them together. Kinda like Scary Movie, but more of plotlines and so on, and with talking dogs.

In conclusion, ok for a comedy film, but kinda forced for a full feature film, the plotlines stretch pretty thin.

I have to say, this is one of the movies where I initially facepalmed quite often in the first 20-30 minutes or so because it seemed so weird, awkward and simply hard to watch. It's not just how Jennifer Lawrence's character is supposed to be, it is about the male lead's reactions as well. There were so many weird reactions in order to continue with the story instead of real-life reactions where a person will simply walk away... or even more normally... call the police.

The initial plot was also strange, everything seems to go right for the female lead generally despite her getting-jailed-worthy kind of acts.

But the later part of the movie was more natural and normal, and has twists that helped the story move along nicely. Eventually, it became kind of cliched but still have outrageous and funny moments.

Overall, it is a good movie since after the initial part, the chemistry between the leads was very well on point and it was pretty wholesome.