Movies
Modest Heroes
Modest Heroes is the first in a 3-part anthology project, made to showcase the talent that resides at Studio Ponoc (the new Studio Ghibli). It's nice to see these people finally been given a chance to prove their worth. Three beautifully animated and pleasantly touching shorts make this an easy recommend for animation fans.
I waited with this film until I finished the first game, it turns out that wasn't necessary at all as the link between both is pretty much nonexistent. The film takes the general concept of the games (two interconnected worlds) and builds its own story on top of that. A promising premise, but the execution falters. The first game was animated by Ghibli, which gave it plenty of charm. The film feels like a cheap imitation. The animation itself is rather poor, the art style lacks detail and looks flat. It comes of as extremely generic, which is a bit surprising considering the studio behind it proved its worth with Modest Heroes just a year earlier. The plot is also very basic, run-of-the-mill JRPG stuff that struggled to hold my attention. The characters are rather generic and the runtime is a little too long, especially considering how predictable everything is. It was nice to see some minor references to the game, but this should've been a lot better. Pretty disappointing.Read all