The Beowulf Express

I've never read "Beowulf". Yes, I took a lot of English classes and read a lot of stuff, but while I've read a lot of the classics, that wasn't one of them. Deal with it.

I will admit that the only thing I really knew about the Beowulf story was what I learned from watching that particular episode of "Xena: Warrior Princess". Hey, I loved that show! But, I knew that they took liberties and really just used classics as source material/jumping off points. So, the story kind of interested me. Point in its favor.

I had heard that it was being animated in a similar style to "The Polar Express", which I didn't see, but I saw enough of the trailer and such to know that I absolutely HATED that style of CGI/motion capture animation. But, no, no, this won't be the same. It's similar, but it's been improved, so the freakish look of Tom Hanks' conductor has been fixed. OK, grudgingly, quarter-point in its favor.

The film is being directed by Robert Zemeckis, who I don't completely follow, but he hasn't totally lost me, so ok, point in its favor.

One of the writers is Neil Gaiman. Serious point in its favor.

Anthony Hopkins is in it. Point in its favor.

John Malkovich is in it. Half-point in its favor.

Robin Wright Penn is in it. Point in its favor.

And then I saw the trailer on television. And the animation looks completely awful to me. Forty bazillion points against it.

OK, now admittedly, I understand that things can look different on TV. I'd really like to see footage from the movie on a big screen, and they may be showing them, but we've not seen many movies lately, so we might just be missing it. But the animation that I saw looks awkward and just wrong, like the animation you got back in the older days of video games, when they couldn't quite get the look of human faces right. That was fine for a video game. And even video game developers have been striving to get the look to be more realistic, more like what you'd see with live people. And they're going to release a movie that looks like the video games of yore?

So I can't decide if I'll be going to see it. Now, I know I've got a couple weeks yet to make up my mind, and I might just go and see if I can get over the look, but I'm pretty sure that having animation that I hate will seriously affect how much I like a movie, just as I will probably like a movie more if the animation is good but the story is lousy.

I seriously hope this isn't the future of the art.