I wasn’t familiar with Wolpaw’s Law until some of you lunatics introduced me to it a couple months back and, for all the anime I’ve watched for this column, I haven’t felt more inclined to invoke that Law until watching this. It fits a lot that it reminds me a lot of game. You want to talk about a very specific kind of memory trigger? This made me think of some really lame CD-ROM point-and-click "interactive movies" I watched/played as a kid in the early 90s when I had no better discretion for how to spend my free time. Some combination of the distracting limited animation, unenthusiastic voice acting, out-of-place CG cut scenes, cool-but-ill-fitting industrial rock and generic “hard sci-fi” dystopia made me think that I'd popped this out of a jewel case.
Motion comics gets brought up a lot in my “other circle” and I’ve honestly never understood their appeal. You’ve got animation that’s limited, by design, in such a way that makes you feel like you’re watching paper dolls being moved over the screen instead of fully-animated characters who can at least fool you into believing they’re real for a while. Maybe you can’t fault a production for trying to tell a story within its means of rendering, but I still feel like the money in the budget that was spent on licensing the music and throwing all those pretty colors on top of the scenery would’ve been better spent on adding some more frames and perspective to the characters’ walking cycles, at least. This wouldn’t have felt like an extended E-Surance commercial that way.
The plot’s about robots, slaves or robot-like human slaves and it was way too paint-by-numbers for me to give it any serious chance. I’m not saying a dystopian sci-fi must have insane action or outrageous satire to work but, boy, LaMB could’ve used that stuff to balance the morose, dull tone. I don't know if peppy line readings would've necessarily helped the material, but the fact that everybody except the Eve robo-slave talked like a text-reading program (a CD-ROM innovation!) certainly wasn't helping either.
Wolpaw's Law. Wolpaw's Law. Just walk away.
Watch this featurette here and decide for yourself.
Tom Pinchuk’s the writer of HYBRID BASTARDS! & UNIMAGINABLE. Order them on Amazon here & here. Follow him on Twitter: @tompinchuk
That's all disappointing. I love the look of that screenshot atleast...
I agree, you should listen to Lord Humongous. He seems like a reasonable man.
I was not a fan of the animation either, motion comics are a bit crude in my opinion. I did however like the story, then again, I tend to enjoy depressing things
EDIT: I would tend to say another big issue with the voice acting, is the same actors who voiced it for the cantonese language version, also did the dubs for the english, japanese and other releases, having actors dubbing into a language that is not their first had to have a negative impact on the voice acting... I just always coughed it up to depressed people sounding depressed
@Vortextk said:
Me too :P
Lovely lady!
I was the one who pointed out Wolpaw's Law to you. Also I linked users to Old Man Murray which is always a dicey proposition.