The Promise

I went to an advance [for Cleve­land] screen­ing of The Promise last night at the Cedar Lee. This is one of those films that uses CG stuff to keep the bud­get low at the price of qual­i­ty. I can’t decide if I’d like it bet­ter as com­plete­ly live-action with no CG or com­plete­ly done in hand-drawn ani­ma­tion. Either option has its pos­i­tives, but the use of CG in this film, in order to cre­ate a feel­ing of fan­ta­sy, is much less effec­tive than either of the options I’d sug­gest. Hand drawn ani­ma­tion [I’d say ani­me, but this film is Chi­nese] would have allowed the fan­tas­tic natures of the char­ac­ters and the realm itself to shine forth at the price of the amaz­ing cos­tumes and chore­o­graphed sequences [although I’m also offi­cial­ly tired of wire-fu, there were oth­er scenes that were quite nice]. A pure live-action film would have echoed Crouch­ing Tiger, Hid­den Drag­on even more than the CG-hybrid ver­sion does cur­rent­ly and would like­ly have lost much of its fan­tas­tic scenery in favor of more nuanced [also offi­cial­ly tired of that word] act­ing and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion. As for the sto­ry… meh, noth­ing I haven’t seen or read a gril­lion times before.