Goblins, Trolls and Gnomes all the things you can find in your backyard, but on the outside just Gnomes. The bitter sweet tale of Romeo and Juliet has gone through many different adaptions, starting from being written by candle light by William Shakespeare to going to stage, and then various film adaptions and evan an epic anime series, Now the dynamic duo has found its way to animation again but this time their tale is told in short supply.
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| Cute, funny, charming, a adaption that both kids and adults will love. |
From the mind of the great William Shakespeare comes the greatest love story ever told but with a twist. In the continuing conflict between red gnomes and blue gnomes a silver lining is found in between their gardens. The Red Juliet meets the Blue Romeo as both attempt to spite the others' family and begin to see that they are not really that different and as the original tale went they became star crossed lovers.
When I first heard of this movie I was like; “Is this Hollywood's idea of the middle finger to Shakespeare?” But after I realized it this was going to happen sooner or later, computer animation would go after Shakespeare and make it into a soft and girlish adaption of one of his tragedies. I don't get why people never try making animated adaptions of his comedies like a Midsummers nights dream (which I starred in high school) but i guess some people like to twist a dark story into a happy go lucky family film.
But I liked this movie. It had the same sense of love and struggle the original story had and it wasn't afraid to dumb it down to the extreme, like pretending that Tybalt just disappeared instead of being killed in combat, and although they do substitute the gore that was in the original play they do it with innovation. For example Tybalt is “killed” in a sense but instead he brakes to pieces being made out of stone so that is an acceptable substitute.
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| Their is what made me praise this film. |
The animation for the film is pretty good and can evan be on par with the animation with Toy Story 3. The reason its so good is that the animators were not lazy and made a wide variety of their characters diverse by giving them different clothing and small cracks on different parts of their figures and of course colour their hats differently so we know who is on which side.
The acting for the film is pretty good but the centre of attention is on the two leads of James Macavoy and Emily Blunt. The two make a lovely incarnation of the greatest couple to ever grace storytelling. They stay true to what their love stands for from start to finish and because of that it makes the story very respectful of their source material and their status as Gnomes makes the relationship evan more cute. The rest of the cast has a good selection of actors such as Maggie Smith, Michael Caine, Jason Stathum and evan Ozzie Osborn but none of them really do much and have little life and personality compared the characters they were made of, its like they were made out of wax instead of rubber.
One other problem I do have with this movie is that the idea of inanimate objects coming to life behind their masters back has been done before with the Toy Story trilogy and because of this it makes you feel the writers took the easy way out and do something Pixar has done. I think this movie would be worth a 80% or higher if they had better dialogue and a better setting. But it still is a good family film that kids and adults will love and that can be thanked thanks to Elton John''s great music.
My Rating: 3/4 Shamrocks.
