Thanks to a blu-ray release of this movie appearing on the internets I decided to check it out. Aviation has always been somewhat close to my heart and it combined with what I understood to be criticism of the modern society did sound rather interesting. The ANN review of the movie praised it as mood-focused film relying on the subtle, deep touching message hidden between the lines of a grand-sounding plot. From Makoto Shinkai’s movies I have learned to appreciate this sort of storytelling and as such I was looking forward to Sky Crawlers. Kurogane’s impressions on the film weren’t anything alarming either. But as you can see from the headline, things didn’t go as smoothly as expected.
I don’t actually have that much to say about Sky Crawlers, because honestly I did not find the film very impressive at all aside from absolutely gorgeous CGI work. To start off let me state that Sky Crawlers is the first piece of animated entertainment ever that has forced me to stop around halfway through and take a three-hour nap before continuing. Oh yeah, in b4 “get back to Nay-roo-toe for swordfight-of-the-day thx“. The first annoyance-worthy thing in Sky Crawlers I found to be the character art. While the backgrounds are beautiful and CGI pretty much flawless the character are simplistic and expressionless to the point that they stand out from the detailed backgrounds like a bucketful of sore thumbs. I also disliked the facial designs but I guess that’s a matter of preference – the characters in Sky Crawlers remind me of Naruto more than just a bit by their facial appearance and this hardly is far-fetched as both franchises have the same character designer.
Say hello to my Sky Crawlers-face.
The movie attempts to build up the mood by utilizing silence and making characters space out quite often. For me this didn’t really work as it seemed like every now and then the animators simply couldn’t think what to do and left the poor characters frozen in an emotionless expression. While using momentary silence is a good strategy in many cases, it’s not very effective if the movie is already filled with it. Let’s face it, outside the CGI sequences involving airplanes flying and shooting shit Sky Crawlers could make an average crowded Finnish public transit bus look like a discoteque in the terms of noise – and trust me, many tourists mistake those things to hearses. For me I guess the problem with Sky Crawlers lies in its weak character execution. People seem expressionless, emotionless and distant, leaving me unable to understand or even care about their life and problems. Not that the movie would even bother explaining any of these to a notable detail as it relies on the viewer to read the stuff from between the lines – which is quite difficult when one can hardly even care about the characters and whatever happens to them.
Bottom line: Sky Crawlers was a dull experience thanks to weak, distant characters and rather insignificant plot. The scarce dogfight sequences are of course mind-blowing but do not really pay back the effort – I might as well rewatch Macross Zero. The critical message that the film is supposed to convey according to the ANN review was nowhere to be found. Honestly, I cannot think any way how characters in this movie are supposed to represent people who withdraw from being a productive members of the society – with the possible exception of being about as distant and dull to the viewer as real-life hikikomori may be. Personally I could see similar themes to Orwell’s 1984 but nothing too concrete to make any conclusions from. A pack of beer might open things up for me but hell, I can think of a whole bunch of better things to watch with that. End of Eva next, stay tuned.