20140317: Animation Review--AniMen the Galactic Battle

AniMen: the Galactic Battle

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. Chinese animated feature length film, 2012, unrated, 86 minutes, animation, adventure.
2. IMDB: 3.6/10.0 from 27 audience ratings.  Spoken language on Netflix was English.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 'No Reviews Yet...', and 'No score yet...'
4. Netflix: 2.8/5.0 from 56,610 audience ratings.
5. Written and directed by: Xu Kerr.
6. Starring: Bruce Boxleitner as General Moss, Steve Blum as Colonel Steel, Keith David as Sergeant Brass, JB Blanc as Captain Hered, Ogie Banks as Sergeant Gator, Jim Cummings as Xanthor.


2. Setup and Plot
1. This is a space opera rendered using 3-d animation objects.


2. In some galaxy, at some time or another in the history of the cosmos, two sides fight in space.  The Swarm is a single race that has huge numbers.  Many of their members seem to be fairly stupid insect forms that are fitted to combat.  The leaders are few in number, but good at coordinating the hordes of underlings.  The other side is mostly made of humanoids with two arms, two legs, one head, who walk and run upright.  So they are sort of like humans, but still look nothing like Earth humans of the present day.


3. In the opening, General Moss on the humanoid side (the Starworld Alliance) is gathering some sort of intelligence against the Swarm in the form of chips.  He succeeds at that, and narrowly makes his escape at the cost of the lives of several underlings.


4. The scene switches to scenes of militarised non-Swarm life.  We see some training with armored suits.  We switch again to space battles.


5. General Moss returns to the Alliance side during the battle.  Everyone seems concerned about keeping him safe.  The elite 'Triton Force'  is made up of armed flying armoured suits (like badly designed Gundam), and are allies of Moss.  Xanthor is the main leader of the Swarm that Moss and company face.  Xanthor wants to kill Moss and get the chips.  The Triton Force wants to protect Moss and get the chips to the Alliance.


6. So, who comes out on top?


3. Conclusions
1. One line summary: Looks like an old video game made into a movie.
2. Two stars of five.


4. Scores
1. Art/animation: 4/10 About 40% of the runtime is just beautiful, visually speaking.  Then the rest of it is iffy or poor, as in mid-1990s poor.


2. Sound: 4/10 The voice actors were miked OK, but incidental music and sounds were not really effectively used.  The synchronisation of mouth movements and words was rather bad, as often happens in the mixed language setting.


3. Voice Acting: 5/10 There were professional voice actors involved. Bruce Boxleitner and Keith David from live action movies come to mind, as do the veterans Steve Blum from Cowboy Bebop and Ogie Banks from Ultimate Spiderman.  Most of the lesser parts were poorly handled by much less skillful voice actors.


4. Screenplay: 0/10 Terrible.  Full of poor one liners that are not funny.  The script seemed to be an afterthought.  The flow of beginning => middle => end was nowhere near smooth.  The chain of command in the Alliance military seemed to be entirely broken.  The ending was nonsensical.  The main thread of the film was abandoned rather than resolved.