ken558

Visual wise - excellent, till it got too too much until it's just a colour blender blur to bother really watching.

Story-wise - okay then still okay then got silly bad with trite copycatting of the already way overdone multiversing blah blah that's already out there ad nauseum. Add to that showy plot nonsense that's just a loophole filled poppy garden.

Character-wise - good when limited numbers, then the proliferation of so many spider 'creatures' just made it all a showy yawning bore of bland narcissistic voices.

Voiceovers-wise - good throughout BUT the dialogue scripted was too sub-par meh to maintain viewers engagement.

Dialogue - uneven - some parts okay but too many parts with ineffectual wise-cracking that feels totally forced, and definitely became less and less funny as they also became totally redundant and detract from the plot narration.

Generally a good visual watch, BUT could have been that much much better if there is a lot lot lot less showing-off and a great deal more focus on key characters, tight narration, and better defined plot structure.

Wasted opportunity by too many people involved trying to show off inevitability evolving the whole enterprise into an overbloated overlong mess rather than telling a good story.

No interest whatsoever in another overbloated overlong egoistic mess. So forget the 'to be continued' cringe.

As far as Inga knows, she was raised by her grandparents after her mother drowned. An aspiring writer, Robert, happens to come about her real back story and makes contact with Inga, with an ill-conceived plan to use her as the subject in his first novel without her knowledge, taking notes about her as she goes about uncovering her past.

Acting overall is fine. However, the key failing of this movie is that both the protagonists do not inspire viewer empathy. Inga's reaction and behaviour is too adolescent and self-centred for us to care enough about her and her 'predicament', zings coming across as unnecessarily selfish and petulant, so we just watch her disconnected and unmoved. Robert is too low-key, hesitant and annoying, so we too watch him unmoved.

Only the mother held some empathy from the viewer - a relatively small part, played by the same actress playing Inga the daughter. While the acting was fine, it is perplexing why the director would have both of these characters look exactly exactly exactly the same, which is ridiculous, confusing and annoying to the viewer. Using a more sepia tone to denote we are watching the past is not good enough when the two different characters obviously look identical.

Overall, it is a good enough effort from director Christian Schwochow, given this is his first feature length movie.

The best thing about this animation are the visuals - the clarity and attention to details are mostly fascinating.

This movie is reasonably good but not superb, and definitely worthy of much more attention then it eventually received, having done rather poorly at the theatres, as I understand from Wikipedia. Sadly, after seven years since its release, I am the first (but hopefully not only) person to review it here.

While the animation is top notch, the premise is generally acceptable but not unique enough - movies with very similar storyline (both life and animated) about teenagers at school and growing up, have been thoroughly done all over the world - Korean and Japanese included. The plot is acceptable, but adds nothing new enough to make it stand out.

The pacing is also too slow (even the characters themselves often look bored), and the few main protagonists are not given enough oomph and the all important je-ne-sais-quoi to capture the viewers empathy and attention. (It also did not help that the version I saw did not have very good English subtitles - substantial meaning and nuances are probably lost through the poor translation and poor title timing).

An outstanding animation needs to have key traits about it that would make a life version of it lacking and inferior, compared to its animated version. However, Green Days can be easily conceived as being as good or better if done life - hence, while there are no complaints about the animation itself, at the same time, animation did not bring anything sufficiently unique or outstanding to the movie (except for the last 10 mins of the 'dinosaur park fantasy' sequence where animation did count).

Insufficient marketing funds aside, this animation while definitely worthy and competent, is not able to stand out from the crop of good to excellent similarly-themed animations that have emanated from Japan, and apart from the language there is nothing about it (probably unless you are Korean) that marks it out as quintessential 'Korean'.

Do I recommend it? Yes, sure of course - while it is not right up there amongst the best, it is still heads and shoulders above the host of other lesser animations.