I finally saw Beowulf, and there's something I find very interesting about it.
As a live-action film, I would judge it a cornball failure ... yet as a cartoon, I deem it pretty much a rousing success.
As such, I'll grant it the benefit and consider it an animated tale. The characters pretty much look like the humans in Shrek, so I can go with the animated angle - even though the humans were crafted by scanning the movements of live actors and not by artisans of any kind "drawing" the animation. But there were plenty of creatures and locations that were traditionally animated ... hahaha, in the sense that computer animation has now become "traditional."
Some of the main characters look pretty photo-realistic, but they've still got that Shrek-ish feelling about them, and they move in a vaguely
animated way. The background characters, and even some of the character roles, are completely Shrek-like. So it really comes off as an animated movie ... in which the somewhat cornball telling of the Beowulf tale fits just fine.
Oddly, while some of the characters look nothing like the actors who provide their voices (as would be typical for an animated film), a few are disconcertingly designed to look just like the actors who portray them ... further blurring the line between live-action and animation.
It's that blur that makes this an interesting movie for me. I'm fascinated that I apparently have widely different criteria for a successful live-actioner than I do a cartoon.
Also, though I'm certainly no Beowulf expert ... it appears they did a very good job in adapting the tale to movie form. Kudos for that.
Overall - - surprisingly not bad. Oh and Ray Winstone (who plays Beowulf) has a fantastic voice. Love the way he says 'Monsta."
