We Are the Strange

By far the weirdest movie I have ever seen. When M dot Strange was told to think outside the box, he overshot a little. He stepped out of the box, and punted it into the sea. At the screening at Sundance, M dot Strange said that he pretty much locked himself in his room with a bunch of broken toys, and nine computers. He stayed there for more than a year with only his frighteningly twisted imagination, and came out with this animation that is a mix between Stop-motion, Computer animation, 8 bit video game animation, and Japanese Anime. He calls it "Str8nime". The visuals are absolutely stunning. An electric-techno roller-coaster of a movie, with a soundtrack equally colorful. The imagination of M dot Strange is truly dark and wild.

enjoy, and hide your soul, because this film might try to take it.

CL

Someone here said not to watch this movie for the plot, but to watch it for the visuals. Follow that advice! This movie is is an amazing, beautiful, stunning, _painting with audio_. This is an amazing piece of art, but this is far from a "movie". This is a series of beautiful paintings set to great video game style audio and sound effects. This movie belongs in a gallery, not a theater.

I'm not a huge art fan so I didn't really enjoy this movie past the first 10 minutes. Actually, I gave up after 35 minutes and just turned off the laptop. The movie lacks a plot (at least one I could detect), and between the visuals I was left wondering "is this what people see when they're on acid?". It an amazing piece of art, but not something I would call entertainment.

This movie is surreal; this movie is disturbing; this movie is fascinating. As a piece of cinema, it's terrible. Most audiences simply could not sit through something like this in a dark room with a big screen.

As art, I'd say this film is a success. It is extremely unique, and in it's own low-budget way very well done. I have never seen a film before this that combines such diverse graphic art into a visual whole. The visual and audio effects are rather hypnotizing, though not in a good way.

"We Are the Strange" is aptly named, and very hard to like. It is largely incohesive, though there is some semblance of plot. The images and sounds are fairly unpleasant, and after about ten minutes you get the first urges to turn it off. I appreciate this as a unique and powerful art film, but I don't find it entertaining.

We Are The Strange.

What can I say about this movie. It's an experience, to say the least. I can almost guarantee you that within the first ten minutes of the movie your first comment will be "What the ****?!" Looking at the title you'd think this movie was, well, strange. But 'strange' alone in a gross understatement. Saying this movie is "strange" is like saying the surface of the sun is "toasty." You might try to compare this to other strange movies like, say, Labyrinth, or Corpse Bride, but really you can't. You just can't.

More than anything else, this movie is a statement in visual art. The combination of stop-motion animation, 8-bit graphics, and CGI animation is both innovative and crazy to look at. The dark world that is StopMo city (get the name?) has almost no cohesive structure to it whatsoever. The fight scenes (if you can call them that) which were most definitely inspired by old school anime, is like watching a kid play with action figures. Actually the whole movie feels like it come from the deep dark recesses of some ten-year-old's abandoned toy chest.

The character designs are...innovative. The first Characters we meet Blue and HIM are probably the closest to normal anybody's gonna get in this film but that's not saying much. eMMM, Rain, and Ori look like they came from nightmares of Tim Burton. Despite the crazy designs however, each character's design, better than any other movie I've seen, reflects that character's personality, purpose, and even background almost perfectly. You take one look and you can easily say "Oh, this is the bad guy" or "Oh, definitely a tragic heroine" and so on.

The dialog (there's dialog in this movie?!) is few and far between. There's probably less than five minutes of speech throughout the entire movie...for all characters combined. Like I said, this is more on visuals. What dialog does exists is short and straight to the point. There are no pointlessly long exchanges between characters even for humor's sake. Each sentence spoken has heavy significance to the plot so when someone talks you'll know you should listen.

As for the plot (yes, boys and girls, there is a plot in here somewhere) it's hard to find at first, mainly because of the movie trying to visually rape your mind. But if you concentrate really hard (I mean reeeeeeally hard) there is a coherent plot about two lost tragic characters trying to find their way.

eMMM and Blue are the classic tragic heroes, both starting out at the bottom of the dumps then slowly but surely finding their courage within each other. the vigilante pair Rain and Ori, though feeling like a really bad ripoff of Batman and Robin, presented an exciting view of a wrongfully accused man and a misunderstood weirdo, fighting for justice. HIM is the stereotypical villain of the piece who thinks of only himself and thinks nothing of plunging the city into darkness if for nothing more than his own pleasure.

All of these character elements come together in a straight-forward plot line typical of most epic stories. The characters and their motivations are easy to understand once you get into the movie and it's easy cheer for the good guys and hate the bad guys (though HIM's low droning voice make it kinda hard to take him seriously) Watch this movie once to get a hang of the visuals. Watch it again to truly appreciate the story.

In conclusion, I loved this movie. I really did. It was weird yes, but refreshing in a way that it provided an escape from the usual canned mainstream coming out of Hollywood. It was an experience to savor. It's not boring. It never gets boring. Sure you'll feel like a weirdo for appreciating it, but maybe that's a good thing.

Just for chuckles, you should also watch the 1337 version.

Finally I get to see We Are The Strange. I don't remember in the slightest how I came to know about M. Dot Strange's work, but overall I'm glad I did. What we have here is a technical achievement on a pretty high level. The story itself is simple, but at the same time, it's really hard to understand. I urge everyone thinking about seeing this movie to read up about what the movie is about first. If I didn't know the plot beforehand, I would have been completely and utterly bewildered right up until the end of the flick. But the plot isn't the reason to watch this film. It's the visuals and the sound. It's really like nothing I've ever seen, and most likely nothing you've seen as well. I enjoyed We Are The Strange due to it's imaginative art, music and style, but I still felt lost quite a bit...too much so. This is a movie for people who are artistic, imaginative and adventurous with their movie watching, everyone else should stay put.