28°C
Partly cloudy
Fri
30°C
Sat
29°C
Sun
29°C

Powered by WeatherAPI.com

USD $1 ₱ 56.28 0.0000 March 27, 2024
March 26, 2024
Ultra Lotto 6/58
232648012531
₱ 49,500,000.00
2D Lotto 2PM
2819
₱ 4,000.00

‘A Warrior’s Tale’ is Subpar

The animation feels pretty static, a reliance on totally unnecessary slow motion pretty much killing the momentum of a lot of these sequences.

A Warrior’s Tale tells the story of Savva (voiced in English by Milla Jovovich), a young boy who lives in a village in the middle of the forest. A gang of hyenas attacks the village and takes control of everything. They enslave the villagers and take all the food. Savva manages to escape into the forest, where he runs into the white wolf Anga (Will Chase). The wolf tells him about a magician that lives on a mountain who can grant them wishes. The two venture into hostile territory, gathering new friends along the way, hoping to reach the magician.

This animated feature is a Russian production. Russia has a fine tradition of animation, its output in previous decades some of the most inventive and distinctive artistic works of the history of animation. It is somewhat of a shame, then, that A Warrior’s Tale is just another glossy, computer generated picture. Worse yet, it isn’t a very good one. Suffering from a listless plot, ugly character designs, and other questionable choices, the movie just doesn’t live up to the storied history of Russian animation, and it certainly doesn’t achieve the basic standard of the modern animated films.

The story mashes up some Russian folklore into a single unwieldy narrative. There is actually too much going on in this story, the film seemingly unable to figure out what story it actually wants to tell. It gets pretty weird. At one point, a jungle tribe is singing a song to one of the characters. Later on, there’s a big fantasy battle that looks like it’s from a completely different movie. All through this, the story is actually still just about Savva trying to make his way to this magician, which is the least interesting narrative possibility given all the various threads.

In the end, the film takes all these various elements drawn from Russian folklore and reduces them into something more generic. A lot of stuff happens, but none of it is particularly interesting. It just feels like the film is trying to ape the success of popular Hollywood films. And it’s not a good look. The character design is downright ugly at times. The animation feels pretty static, a reliance on totally unnecessary slow motion pretty much killing the momentum of a lot of these sequences.

It’s just not fun. The film fails at fairly basic storytelling elements. Part of the problem probably lies in a general lack of resources. Things probably had to be truncated or excised completely for the sake of reducing costs. But at some point, the general lack of storytelling skill becomes apparent. There are scenes that move too slowly, and punchlines that never land. The English voice acting is serviceable, but not particularly good. There are some surprising names in this cast, but they hardly seem enthused to be involved.

Advertisement

A Warrior’s Tale is just deeply unnecessary. We don’t need any more of these generic computer generated adventure tales. We certainly don’t need it from Russia, which has a far richer tradition of animation. It could have taken a different path, the way the Russian masters of decades past decided that they just want to do things the way Hollywood did. But A Warrior’s Tale doesn’t seem to have that gumption, and the result is decidedly subpar.

My Rating:

Related Content

Movie Info

A Warrior's Tale
Adventure, Animation, Fantasy
User Rating
4.0/5
1 user
Your Rating
Rate
Critic's Rating
1.5/5
Read review

Share the story

Advertisement
Advertisement

Recent Posts

Hot Off the Press