Ben Hibon has done an amazing job with his animated short, Codehunters.  Absolutely beautiful, and a must for cyberpunk/steampunk fans out there.   At first glance it reminded my of Jamie Hewlett’s work (Gorillaz/Tank Girl) and there are touches of Peter Chung in there too (Dark Fury).  Mad Max meets Akira.  The near-dark future stuff that nightmares are made of.

Words from The Edwin.

http://edwinmcrae.com

I went to see Max & Co this week. A cute story by Christine Dory and Emmanuel Salinger, and very cool stop animation. The mise-en-scene is a nice mixture of steam-punky technology and alpine small-town idealism. And there’s something I really like about French with subtitles. Just sounds cool.

While it’s essentially a kids film, it has some nice adult level moments, like when the captured flies are gassed, have orgasms, and lay eggs while cavorting drunkenly through the air. Well, I laughed.

So, highly recommend it if you get the chance to see it.

The gimmick of this film is the computerized animation called “rotoscoping,” which is the film equivalent of running an expensive Photoshop filter over a picture. Because of this effect, it is obvious that “real actors” are guiding the movements of the so-called “animated” characters, giving the film a somewhat surreal effect. Some fans of the film loved this effect. Personally, I thought it was not only unnecessary, but implemented poorly. (At times, the “real world” surroundings underneath the animation were all too real, thus popping you out of the animated world.)

I’m a fan of animation but it must be done well. Poorly done animation is worse than poor cinematography. And while this wasn’t so bad as to be painful to watch, the animation was distracting and not captivating to me personally. If the film had been shot straight with top-notch cinematography, I feel that it would have enhanced the film greatly. I’ll hazard a guess that it would have made a huge difference in the success of the film, making it much more appealing to mainstream audiences, and giving it much more stature as a long-lasting cult sci-fi film.

So thus the film already has a strike against it (in my book) with the cheap, gimmicky animation effect. From there, director Richard Linklater’s screen adaptation is simply not as strong as it could be. Not having read the original book, I could still get a glimpse of probably what was originally a much better story. Linklater seems to be confused himself as to whether he’s directing a futuristic thriller, an underground humorous drug flick filled with meaningless clever banter meant to appeal to the hipster crowd, or a purposefully confusing arthouse piece meant to “make you think.”

The beginning, in particular, is a confused mish-mash as we begin with not the main character, but a secondary character who barely plays a role as the film goes on. He’s having an obviously bad drug trip and imagining bugs crawling all over his skin. We creep slowly from there to meet our hero/anti-hero played by Keanu Reeves, who is apparently some sort of undercover cop out to bust a drug ring.

Meandering to start and sometimes painful in dialogue and delivery, the film finally picks up a bit in the middle. Things get more entertaining, at least, with the introduction of Woody Harrelson’s character, who breaks up some of the confusion and monotony by being quite funny at times. He plays well off of Robert Downey, Jr. (Alas, it’s hard not to think Downey probably referred to his own coke-induced stupors as his inspiration in playing a druggie).

Fortunately, the momentum picks up and the film does have a satisfying ending. Still, I think this could have been much, much better. It’s a great concept and an important topic, so I hope another director will someday take a shot at Dick’s novel.

I give this a B-.