Cartoon praised by film critics on YouTube. I saw in the reviews praise that the cartoon is of some special depth. So where? Do you confuse pity with philosophy by accident? I found almost nothing worthwhile in it. Except that the characters really die, not pretend, not to be resurrected in 2 minutes, but you know... at all. As in reality. This is happening less and less in cartoons, and this courage must be noted.
Everything else is boring, uninteresting, attractive. There is no content for the full-length, it is a maximum of 15 minutes. Battle scenes are sluggish, for example, the skeleton almost did not attack the heroes, he just tossed around and lazily grabbed his paws, it was very easy to defeat him. Why do beetles and monkeys fight all the time? The script, that's what! I just had to suck some dialogue out of my finger. At the same time, the monkey pokes gestures and builds such grimaces that are simply impossible in Asian culture - it is built on respect for the interlocutor, where any household object is transmitted with both hands, so as not to offend with a careless attitude, there they do not look in the eyes, special respectful suffixes are added to the names. And the gestures and behaviors shown here were at the level of the kitchen bickering of drunks. I don’t believe the characters even at the most basic level, I don’t believe their gestures, so the atmosphere of the work is destroyed at the base. And there are no dialogues, there is either cliché, or statement of the obvious, or babbling. Compare this with dialogue in any cartoon from Pixar – there is not a word, it is an emotion: laughter, tears, cultural references, lore, life lessons, real problems and solutions.
Plot: you need to find armor, how to look – we do not know, but we just go forward, and they somehow found themselves, on the way accidentally caught. Why was the mother in her guise crazy, and when she became a monkey, she immediately returned to normal mentally? I can't empathize with a character when the authors don't know what his character is. The motivation of opponents is not serious - well, give birth to a new heir in your world, and the whole issue is solved. Why is there an inheritor of an immortal god? The boy needs to tear out his eye to make him merciless. Are all the cripples evil? The boy collects the armor of the sun to symbolically defeat the deity of the moon – well, they still know that the moon is bad, of course. The subtext of family values is also strange, because the boy grieves for his parents who have not yet died, is fighting with another relative. The final fight causes a stupor, because the characters throughout the film were looking for pumped armor, so that the boy at the end like this and threw them and fought with a balalaika. So he could have done it from the beginning. The main villain was taken and forgiven by the whole world after he burned the village, also endowed with universal love and adoration - they still know that the enemy must be made a people's idol for the taken eye. Such nonsense.
I put 5 points only out of respect for the work of animators, a puppet cartoon, a lot of work is invested in it. It also has very good music that saved the day. If it weren’t for the music, the review would be devastating. By the way, in the world box office, the cartoon barely paid off its budget, and I think this situation is fair. The studio should be looking for normal writers.