Review of The Book of Life (2014) by Carlotta 4 — 06 Oct 2016

This is a tricky movie for me, because on one hand I love the art direction and there's some really good character design and humor! On the other hand the movie could have been much better with a few key changes. First: remove the museum portion. Every time I started to get involved and interested in the movie the museum would come out of nowhere and break my immersion with the story. It was QUITE distracting. Second: The main girl character. I've seen a lot of "I don't need no man, I'm a strong woman" characters and they almost always end up being damsels and marry items anyway. No different here. And lastly: less modern songs. The first one they used was a mariachi version and I thought it was really clever how they incorporated it into the film. Some of the other songs, however, still felt too modern and could have been worked in better (or omitted).

But nitpicks aside I loved the diety characters and particularly the "evil" one. It's so rare to have characters like that have facets to their personality and not just be straight up evil for evil's sake. The art was beautiful, and it was a lot of fun seeing the various lore and journey our hero went on.

It was a fun little watch.