There was some debate as to whether Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf should be submitted to the Academy as a live-action or animated feature for awards consideration; entirely unnecessary, as a) this film ain’t winning any awards, and b) there’s no question – it’s animated all the way.
And for all the talk of the groundbreaking techniques used here, I see no improvement (from a technical side) from that last you-can’t-tell-it’s-animated film, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within; looking at the screen I’m still staring into soulless eyes and stiff characters.
What has improved, however, is the directorial approach taken by Zemeckis; instead of throwing faux-realistic animation at us and calling it a day, we’re taken on a journey that couldn’t have been duplicated in a live-action film – long, flowing, sensous ‘camera’ takes, impossible angles, minimal editing.
There’s a level of art here sorely missing from most computer-generated animation that I truely appreciated.
Screenplay by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary delivers (surprisingly) the most compelling screen version of the classic epic poem yet (not that there’s been much competition).
The hideous monster Grendel (Crispin Glover) is attacking the Danish kingdom of King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins); hearing of a need for a hero, Beowolf (Ray Winstone) soon turns up to slay the beast and his mother (Angelina Jolie).
But, ’tis only the beginning of this tale. I cannot fault the screenplay, direction, or ‘performances’ here. I only fault the animation, which another step in that is-it-real? direction that simply hasn’t been perfected yet.
The rotoscoping techniques used by Ralph Bakshi and (later) Richard Linklater were – for my money – more ‘realistic’ than anything I see here, and traditional animation routinely gives us characters with more personality and ‘soul’.
I wish this version of Beowulf was filmed using either of those techniques, or even in live-action; the film could have been great. Instead it’s merely good.
