Grumpy I don't know where this "style" of animation comes from. No, seriously, I don't know. But it seems like a lot of similar stuff was cranked out back in the eighties in shows like "He-Man" or "GI Joe." Every man a steroid-abusing lunk, every woman an astringent big sister. Is that how the world looks to eight-year-olds? I don't know.I do know that what we see here is an alternative Earth where Martian steroid technology was adapted by Nicolai Tesla to enable all men to be gigantic muscle gods. Or something. But the 'roids also cause them to have bizarre behavioral changes--including constant teeth-clenching, weird grimmacing and a propensity to engage in suicidal fights--with each other, with Martians, with inanimate objects. All the actors spit out their lines like they are The Pharaoh cursing the Israelites. "Where're my pancakes!" sounds like a call to battle in this demented world where everything is macho and nothing is...well, um, "un-macho"?It's all about the booming and the bashing and the hitting and the smacking, with unintentional comic relief provided by the tiny (of course)"girl" who has one heck of an anime hair-do. Anything--anything would have helped this dead whale get off the ground, except what they did. In this demented world, everything is based upon the social structure and skills of eight-year-olds. Conflict? Fight! All it needs is music by Metalica to be a perfect example of why maturity is a good thing.Give this one a pass.

Zach Weandesh This movie is HARD to review, if anything it is a prime example of a 'mixed bag'.At first the good stuff: The premise of the movie is downright genius. The design of the world (not the character design, later more on that) is wonderful and complaining whether it is steam- or diesel-punk is nitpicking. There are many ideas/designs, that made me downright jealous, why I did not come up with them. At some points I even wanted to point at the screen and say: "They put this historical character in this situation? Awesome!" or "Oh, look at this!", especially when it came to the creative background art. The opening-sequence is wonderful, too (the song accompanying is not). And finally, I enjoyed the action-scenes, despite all the issues the movie has. It is a decent action-flick if you don't have too high expectations. Having that said, here the bad things: Animation: First and foremost, the animation of the characters is bad, 1980s-western-television-animation-bad. It is clunky and the characters convey less emotion, than the puppets from the Thunderbirds T.V.-Show. The phoned-in voice acting does not help either. The bad animation attributes to some serious blending issues the film has. Especially the bad character animation does not go well with the rest of the film. WOTW Goliath feels like the teams of CGI-, classic animation and 'rest' did not communicate at all. CGI is passable.The character design is poor. Many characters have the same stereotypical body-type repeated over and over again. You will also notice that some of the men apparently have their shirts directly painted on their skin. Writing: Although there are some fun ideas in the movie, the writing is something between bland and bad. Many lines and actions stood out as stupid, forced or contrived. You know that you in for sub-par writing, when someone drops the line "As you know..." and then spills exposition to an audience that already knows these facts... an exposition, mind you, that was already perfectly conveyed to the viewer in the 10 minutes prior. The movie devolves into "fight fight fight", with no real character-development after the point the martians have landed, but I don't complain about that – that was what I wanted to see after all. I would guess that this movies was originally planned as an OVA or series, but then got cut down to the length of a movie. Direction: There is one thing that really ANNOYED me: In nearly every shot of this movie the camera is either panning, zooming in or out and/or tracking somewhere. Often this establishes something the audience has already seen before. This annoyed me so much so, I had to think at the 'slanted angles' from Battlefield Earth. I even assume that some people might even get motion sick while looking at it.Conclusion: "Force the Guillermo del Toro to do his take on this."

krotkruton-447-902827 At face value, this seems pretty cool - the Martians return to Earth years after their initial invasion attempt and face off against Earth's newly advanced armies. Animation isn't high grade but it isn't bad either, and the 3d-style robots are great if that's your kind of thing.But execution is pretty miserable. The writing isn't the worst I've seen, but it's not great. The worst parts is the lack of consistency. For example, as is common with a lot of movies, the monsters alternate between being invincible to laughably weak depending on the needs of the heroes. On top of that, they seem to determine in the beginning of the movie that heat rays are the monsters' weakness, yet they continue to throw barrages of bullets and missiles as if they do any good. Then there's the outrun-the-chain-explosion sequence. And what really drives me nuts, in one sequence they're fighting 3 monsters, they shoot 2 down and are fighting 1, then suddenly they're fighting 2 again, then 1, then 2, then they shoot down 1 of the remaining two and fight 1 until they kill it.So I guess I was expecting too much out of this movie. Maybe it's more of a kids movie, but the flesh melting scenes made it feel a bit adult to me. If you hate plot holes, this movie isn't for you, but if you just want to watch some anime action sequences, then it's right up your alley.

vampyralic I am an ardent movie-goer and when someone told me of a USA-Malaysia collaboration of an indie animation film project, I was intrigued. For one thing, I know how difficult it is to get to the point where indie projects DO get made, and that would involve money, time, a lot of passion and tons of support from all directions. For another thing, I am a fellow South-East Asian and I am always looking to help boost signals of the range of artistic talent and wonderful stories that belong to our geographical area.It so happened that I was invited to the special preview at last year's Comic-Con and I cleared my busy hectic SDCC schedule just to make it there.For the budget that it had, "War of the Worlds: Goliath" (WotW:G) was entertaining fare. I went to the premiere being practically realistic and didn't expect to be totally Wow-ed as if I was a cinema audience watching a Pixar movie. But I was surprised at how good "WotW:G" turned out to be.Yes, some parts of the dialogue were stilted but it got a little more fluid about a third into the movie. The movie didn't waste time on too much prose but was centred on lots of action, warfare and those "hey, you are my bro, man" kinda moments. Very "guy" stuff.I had thought the addition of Raja Iskandar Shah would be the typical token-Asian stereotype but then, he also started using a kris in some key fight scenes.. that's when all bets are off ;)The animation was a mix of 2D-3D.. if you are used to watching anime, it is not really distracting. (Again, this is not a Disney production - nor meant to be!) And I loved the futuristic steampunk concept artwork that was applied quite consistently throughout the film. After all the guns and smoke and explosions that marked most of the movie, the beautiful music scoring for "WotW:G" was something that nailed the emotion and heart of the entire story. At least for me.Watching "WotW:G" gave me some hope --- the mix of styles/ mediums and characters showed how various work in films can cross "the East-West divide" in a positive and unique way. Here's to more successful collaborations like these in the future.