We may be in the midst of a sweaty, soggy summer, but movie studios are already looking ahead to the holiday season, and DreamWorks is hoping parents will bring their kiddies to the celebrity-voiced romp "Rise Of The Guardians."
Based on an ongoing series of young adult novels penned by William Joyce and Laura Geringer, the film features an all-star voice cast of familiar, mythological creatures including: Chris Pine as Jack Frost, Isla Fisher as the Tooth Fairy, Hugh Jackman as E. Aster Bunnymund, Alec Baldwin as a Russian-inflected Nicholas St. North and Jude Law as the Nightmare King. And the plot is pretty straightforward, with all the aforementioned good guys banding together to take on the Nightmare King who is up to some kind of nefarious plot. Fine. But is it just us or does the animation in this look really bad? Like 1990s straight-to-DVD bad? It seems no one could decide if they were going with realism or something more fantastical, and the visual look is stuck somewhere in the middle, not at all aided by the distracting, blocky character design or the weirdly uninvolving color palette. Something here seems really off — it almost looks like cut scenes from a videogame made five or six years ago.
But hey, kids will probably like it and it will keep them quiet for a couple of hours, right? "Rise Of The Guardians" opens in 3D (of course) on November 21st.
