That’s pretty much it.
The animation is unfortunately stiff and doll like. The facial expressions gave me the willies. They just didn’t look or move right. The show really doesn’t fall into the “uncanny valley.” (The point when something starts to bother us because it looks like it should be human, but something is off ) The characters are too stylized for that. They just look like animated dolls whose hair doesn’t move. Still shots from the film look good, far better than when the characters start to move. Joint seams often show up when the camera angle is just so. The camera angles are nicely done and so is the lighting at least.
Realism is tough to pull off in computer animation. Too realistic and they often come away looking like moving corpse or, in this case, dolls. Both just unsettle the viewer and distract them from the story….as much story as Yonna has anyway. Computer animation is best suited to cartoon effects or realistic stylizations like Final Fantasy: Advent Children. Speaking of that, the creator of the film, Kengo Takeuchi, worked on Final Fantasy: The Movie. You can see the similarities between Yonna and Spirits Within. It is unfortunate that these scenes break down as soon as the characters start to move. CGI is a tough thing to get right.
Save yourself the 30 minutes and skip this one unless you are a Computer Animation student.
Agreed with this nice review. ^ ^
I’m not too impressed by the animation either. It looks on par with some game cut scenes. And the story is hardly exciting.
I noticed computer animation is often used just for the sake of using it. There are a lot of short films like this one floating around that were made just to make an animation using a computer without much regard to the story. They try to make something “pretty” and forget that story is what animation is all about.