Leaf Men - An Epic Reaction

Animated films gets a bad rep in the film world. They're generally considered for children alone and thus uninteresting to older viewers and "film buffs". Myself I have been studying the art of making animated short films for the last three years, and I get a lot of humourous comments and questions in regards to its legitimacy. Often is the phrase "it's just a cartoon" uttered, and under that term they umbrella everything from feature-length animated films about barbarians trying to get laid to short animated GIFs featuring dancing babies. People believe that animation is something to just be silly and mindlessly entertaining, and won't give them the the benefit of the doubt. They won't let animated films captivate them in the same way as "proper films". This has lead to the big dogs of animation giving in, they start creating what the audiences want.

The biggest thing  you can notice for yourself is the way that most films these days feature several different age themes, at different times of the films they're aimed at different ages and people. Pixar's UP is the best example of this. If you ask any adult about the film they'll immediately start talking about how great the montage between Carl and Ellie is, they'll talk to length about how that film really is for adults as well as the children they went with. But if you listen closely, they won't tell you much about what's happening after that. At the point when dogs start talking and flying planes the adults are lost and the children starts enjoying themselves. You could argue that UP on its own didn't get an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, but the montage did.

This sort of deal is happening in most of the animated films being made today, with some exceptions amongst the smaller studios trying to break through. And as a person who tries to watch as many animated films as he can I'm starting to get a bit sick of it. The films starts dividing in my head, and I start thinking I've seen a multiple of the films I actually have seen.

Today I watched the film inappropriately titled "Epic".

Walking into this I did have certain expectations, the marketing of the film was pretty clear on what they wanted me to think of this film. They wanted me to think that it's an animated tale about a war of epic proportion, a love story between people who could never be together, a fantasy story about a fantastic world in the midst of our own. Then for some reason a snail showed up and delivered some kind of joke about being a snail.

The film didn't deliver on any of these promises, except for the part of the snail jokes. The film is more of a buddy road-trip film set on a background of an epic war and a fantastical secret world. Now, this is actually a good thing, because for me it meant that everything I had seen in the trailers were wrong and I got to be surprised a lot more than I normally do during films. It could of course have gone horribly wrong, they could've had a much worse film than the trailers lead to believe, but I always found the trailers to be rather mediocre. They were pretty to look at, but didn't seem like anything beyond that. The fact is that this film was pretty marvellous, I don't I'd be stretching reality too far if I said it's the most I've ever laughed out loud during a film.

That's the thing, though, the film is much more of a comedy than an epic romance-fantasy. Those snail/slug jokes are actually some of the best parts of the film.

In a standard, more general, animated film characters like Mub and Grub would just be the comical relief. The characters that keeps the children entertained during darker hours of the film, but in Epic they are merely the more funny characters. Most every character crack a joke at some point, and most of them are pretty darn good.

Aside from the above-average comedic part of the film, there are some pretty good dramatic moments as well. The villian, Mandrake, is one of the better animated villains I've seen in a long time. He's funny, he's scary, and he doesn't seem to mind killing people. You really get the vibe that if he had the option, he would kill you straight away. The few times he doesn't go all out and attack characters is if there's a genuine need for them. Other films might overplay this and have him need every character, but Mandrake is pretty clear on who he needs for what. Another thing that's perhaps a bit unusual for an animated villain these days is that he's motivation isn't purely "I have to take over the world because I need to rule it", he's a bit like that at the start, but the film does evolve his reasons and without spoiling the film I can say that his son is killed by the good guys. This both make you look at the good guys as actual killers, murderers even, and gives the bad guy a good reason to fight back even harder.

When it comes to the problems I addressed at the beginning of this post, of how animated films often are divided into sections for different age groups, this managed to do so very slightly. There was few parts were I thought "oh, this is for children" or "this is for adults", they all blended nicely and turned into one pretty fun film. There are some out of place moments, especially in the beginning, where the overall feeling is in question and it doesn't quite know what it wants to be. That's mostly due to exposition, there are some parts where they just seem to push a bit too much all at once onto the audience.

(There is however one piece of exposition that is beautifully done, click the show button to read my thoughts on that. It is however a bit more spoilerific than the average piece of information in this post, so only click if you're sure)

Nod, the main male character of the film, is a young Leaf-man, who's not yet ready for the adult responsibilities of his world. It's not something you notice at first, but he doesn't have any family in the film, we don't get to meet anyone he cares about, unlike most of the other main characters. Ronin is the closest he's got, he wants to help him get ready for the world, but comes of a bit tough as the army man he is. Their whole relationship is a tad generic, but the evolution is wonderful. As the film goes on and we learn more about Nod we learn that he did have a father. We don't really learn too much, other than he's apparently not around any more. The film goes on, and then it's mentioned almost in passing that he was dead and that Nod greatly misses him. He had fond memories of him. The entire scene is actually more pointed towards getting the main character Mary Katherine (MK) to reveal her feelings for her father who she'd previously brushed off and left behind.

Then, when our heroes are about to embark into the ultimate bad guy lair, Ronin mentions that himself and Nod's father had been there once before. When Nod comments that his father never told him, Ronin simply states that he never got the chance to. This is absolutely brilliant, we learn to easily and unintrusively that Nod's father was killed in action, trying to save his world. It's a last push to Nod to get him to live up to his father's name, and it gives Ronin even more reason to go to the lair. He wants to get revenge for what happened last time he was there.

There's nothing really special about the story about Ronin, Nod and Nod's father, but the way it's told is something I don't see often anymore. It doesn't feel like we're being told something, we're experiencing it along the characters. If all exposition in the film was done this way, it would've been an even better film.

Overall the film is everything from boring and unnecessary to magnificent and magical. I almost didn't go watch this film, and I'm really glad I did choose to go. If you do have the chance, do go watch it when it's out. But do not expect an epic film, except a wonderful one.



Epilogue:

Oh, and there was a really neat little detail in the end credits. MK's father has collected a lot of stuff, and it's revealed that he has pictures and notes of all of them in the film. In the credits the very first picture is dated May 24th 2013. This is obviously the release date of the film in the USA, but they apparently didn't think of changing it for the UK where it premièred the May 22nd.