Film Reviews by YL

I really think people got wrapped up the Guillermo Del Toro hype and watched this movie with that in the back of their mind. I personally thought Hellboy 1 & 2 was great, but having watched this for the first time recently found it very compelling. The cinematography is great, awesome designs, and the father son dynamic was really good.

Couple of downsides would be that the plot does suffer from spiderman 3 style overstuffing, lots and lots of characters and locations just end up being exposition, and could have used a judicious edit, because core of the movie itself is very fun. Also, being mostly set in the UK I did enjoy seeing London and the countryside represented (although the accents of some side characters are atrocious).

I wish they kept going with this instead of going super low budget with the crooked man...but I guess I should give that one a try too!

I recently missed this in the cinema and with everyone calling it a modern masterpiece I couldn't wait to see it on a big OLED screen.

No question the art style, the direction is amazing. Pixar and Disney have been recently really dropping the ball with sticking to the safe glossy plastic art style going on decades, and I have very much transitioned into preferring experimental art style the likes of spiderverse/TMNT, and this oil brush style is something to behold.

Having said that the story is rather....simple and predictable. It it derived from a children's book series from what I understand and it never reaches the heights of melancholy contemplativeness or mind blowing world building or great and memorable character interactions. In fact character motivations and dialogue are often painfully spelt out and reinforced awkwardly again and again, and I would have even preferred if there was no dialogue whatsoever.

It does feel like somewhat of a mash of Wall-E/Iron Giant/Fly away home/Bambi/Last Bastion, that never comes into focus beyond surface level concepts.