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.