Just finished watching the 1-hour LaMB 'special' on Animax.
Oh, wow. That was...horrible. A complete and utter waste of story and funding.
First, the technical side. As mentioned in my first impressions post, the CGI animation is great. Well not Hollywood great...the shading needs work, it falls short on some lighting and sometimes, everything just looks like a mess and stuff. But it works...sort of. However, taking into account that the show isn't about the CGI, this is supposed to be icing on the cake.
As for the 2D animation (for the characters, etc), it's bad. REALLY bad. The kind of bad that makes you want to poke your eye out for them being utterly violated. And that's coming from someone who has seen some pretty bad animation.
For one, they skip frames. Plenty of them. The end result? Choppy looking character action scenes (particularly the Eve VS Keiko fight) that detract from what might actually have been a good moment. Oh, and have you ever seen a guy turn a wheel almost 90 degrees instantaneously? Jack must be some sort of driving god if he can make lightning turns like that.
And another thing? Animation rigging. The way the characters were rigged, their motions looked stiff and stilted. Like, like...I don't know...puppets. Puppets in some sort of perverse show enjoyed only by those who made it. They didn't feel natural at all, almost like the animators didn't know how the hell a human being moves. They make awkward jerking actions, unreal hand movements (the typing oh God the typing), stupid combat movements (who the hell shoots a gun like a conductor waving his baton?), and kissing scenes that look like footmen clashing on a battlefield. And the lips...the lips. They don't sync at all. Kinda like an old
Hong Kong dubbed movie. They just open their mouths and words come out...oftentimes without the lips moving accordingly.
Remember me? Nnnnnng... (note: the movie is a parody)
Some (I'm not allowed to say who *coughsuckupscough*) might say that the production has pushed Flash to its limits. It hasn't; not by a long shot. There are plenty of great Flash-animated productions out there, whether professional or freelance. And sadly, most of them are a hell of a lot better than what LaMB's animation studios could ever churn out. More enjoyable too.
And what's up with the way the Wolves were rendered? They look like they used a completely different art style than the other characters. Perhaps they were recycled from another project? *hint hint*
Next, we have the story/presentation/plot aspect. Now, I'm always particular with the story of any production, and I normally am very understanding of minor plot mistakes, as I can usually read context amid horrible scriptwriting. So what do I think about the plot of this production?
It's mediocre at best.
The story takes place in the planet Cerra, where terraforming efforts have ended in disaster. A specialist is called in to aid in this effort, Jack Griswold (voiced by Vaness Wu). Little is explained about Jack, save for the fact that his wife is dead and he carries her holocube of sorts at all times. He is met by Keiko Suzuki (voiced by Josie Ho), and they proceed to meet with the nefarious-looking head of the CABC. She's not too shabby (nice set she's got)...except that you KNOW she's slightly deranged, whether you watched the introduction or not. He is given his task (and slightly mocked in the process), and is escorted by Keiko to his quarters.
Oh, and a droid, for some reason, seriously wants to destroy the holocube Jack carries for no adequately explored reason. What the hell?
Series of events lead him to acquire his own LaMB, the eponymous pseudo-prison slave units. He and Keiko have a nice little discourse over what the hell LaMBs are. Both of them aren't very convincing.
Eve, the lead LaMB character, becomes his assistant. And he wants to dress her up nice, with clothes designed by Vivienne Tam. Wait, what?
Anyway, Jack gawks at her...err, dress? Afterwards, a series of events lead up to the inevitable irony. Long story short, Wolves attack, LaMB fights back, LaMB gets shocked, Keiko gets Laminated, Keiko goes on rampage, they fight, Jack 'dies' (he gets better), Keiko dies, Jack visits wife's grave (planet's all better now), Jack and Eve kiss, pan out, roll credits. Who the hell writes this stuff?
So why is it mediocre? Well, it's poorly paced for one. Everything is happening too damn fast. Understandably, it's only 1 hour long...what, that's all they could afford? They had to cram all that material in 1 hour, when they could have like made it more of a standard 1:30 movie.
Moreover, there's little to no foreshadowing of anything. Things just...happen. Unexplained. I suppose if you read the supplementary materials, you'd get the inkling of what's actually going on. Otherwise, you're pretty much in the dark. Like, when was Keiko's revenge set into motion? Had one not read the backstory materials (web manga, etc), one would never have guessed. This is not good practice.
And another thing. This thing has more plotholes than Swiss cheese. What happened to Lamination? Was it abolished? Was only Eve freed? What about the directress of the CABC? She escapes death by Keiko, then what?
Plants that secrete water? (Okay, I'll go with that...suspension of disbelief...barely) It's bordering on insanity, for all the science it's supposedly rooted on.
They're also being very selective of to who and how the LaMB rules apply. They said LaMBs cannot do things on their own (due to nanomachines directly controlling their movement); they must be ordered. Well, I see plenty of uncalled actions there, like the fighting between Eve and Keiko. And when Keiko was slaughtering human mooks, she didn't seem to feel that nice shock all LaMBs are supposed to get when doing all the stuff she was. You might ascribe this to her Lamination perhaps not being complete, but when she stabs a plot-important character, she gets a huge shock. Way to be selective there, kiddies. And these are their own rules. It's like there were no rules at all, and a little bit of willpower can easily override the nanomachines. Great! What rules are in place again?
And a lot more. Believe me, it makes my head spin just thinking about it. I don't know if I should be feel angry or sorry at the original scriptwriter. Animax probably deserves a smack on the head for their adaptation...and depending on what the original script contained, another one for him.
Well, let's just move on to the voice acting. While I'm sure that Vaness Wu and Josie Ho did the best they could, they just couldn't deliver what the scenes required of them. It often became
narmy, and made it supremely difficult to connect or empathize with the characters. Oftentimes, their accents slip real bad, and makes them sound real funny, and sometimes makes them unintelligible. Their emotions don't come out properly, or never at the right moment.
In fact, the best voice acting in the show was...the Stewardess from the Jack shuttle scene at the beginning. Kudos to her voice actress, whoever she was.
The music is highly inappropriate. Oftentimes, the music clashes so much with the dialogue, I'm straining to filter out the BGM just to be able to understand what the heck they're saying.
They said they used quite a lot of money on this ($6m according to their info), and I'm assuming that a very huge chunk of that went to paying for all the hype-generating promotional stuff:
- Getting popular voice actors (Vaness Wu and Josie Ho), plus their promotional tours
- Getting two popular bands to perform the OST. Double points if they were asked to compose something.
- Getting Vivienne Tam to design outfits used in the show...what a waste, it got incinerated anyway.
- Development of promotional Flash games.
- Development of promotional Website, full Flash.
- Creating all the music videos for both Simple Plan and Click Five.
- All the advertising
- For the contest prizes
After all this, you finally get to the meat: the actual production. They must've run out of funding rendering all the 3D CGI, because the 2D suffered greatly. That, or they rushed the project. Bad.
Now my head hurts from LaMBasting LaMB (hur).
Oh, dear Animax. What happened to all that hype? Perhaps I wouldn't be so harsh if it weren't so damn hyped to be a milestone in Anime history. It's not. At best, it's just another forgettable anime with bad animation. At worst, it's a waste of time and funding both for Animax and for fans everywhere.
Two words: Epic fail.
Credit to Wikipedia for the picture of Master Betty. Lurkmore.com provides the QUALITY image and article.
