The Clockwork Girl

Good movie!

Good movie!

source: The Clockwork Girl

It's a mixed bag at best. The CGI characters had the look of those on cheap TV kids' shows. The world and characters are interesting, I wouldn't mind seeing this movie remade with an actual budget. This was a weird, creative, and sometimes fun movie with a whole lot more heart than it did animation production values.

A feel good family movie that can be enjoyed by old and young, it kept us entertained from beginning to end. A unique storyline based on an intruquite fantasy world, with interesting characters and unexpecting twists, offering a lot more than special effects.

A constant among other reviews has been to point out the dated animation. There's a very good reason why the movie looks the way it does: it is a low budget indie CG film produced by first timers nearly a decade ago. Labeling The Clockwork Girl as a 2021 release is somewhat misleading. The film was finished in 2013 and aired on Canadian premium television shortly after. It just took until 2021 for the movie to gain widespread distribution. It is a shame, because the visual style is appealing (well, outside of Huxley, but that's the point), it's just let down by technical aspects. The movie does a good job of keeping things going. Everything feels brisk and the plot progression happens smoothly in ways that make sense. I did come in expecting star-crossed lovers and thankfully, the movie does subvert that a bit. However, the runtime leaves a few things underdeveloped, including the villain. There's a twist at the end that really changes how prior actions are viewed, yet the movie has no time to acknowledge that before the credits roll. We needed more of an epilogue to wrap the story up. Acting wise, I felt the main cast did well. Alexa Vega was great as Tesla. Huxley is kind of a brat and I guess Jesse McCartney was okay. Carrie Anne Moss was also a highlight. Soundtrack-wise, the pop song inserts were very out of place. They did not fit the action scenes in a movie that's largely somber in tone. Thankfully, there are only a few, but the rest of the score was forgettable.

It took 5 minutes before my kids left the room... and they are the target audience for this "movie". That someone stole the script from Robots and Pinocchio, mashing it together and then swapped genders just embarrassing. That the handiwork was so bad was also a clear sign that nobody believed in the story to fund it. It almost looked like a tax-write-off to me. My girls laughed and left saying that if they want to look at something that make them feel empowered they rather watch a movie with a script that makes them feel like strong capable humans and not like misfit victimized robots. My interpretation is that: Force-feed kids an ideology and you will only get a strong revolt against it. Happy to see that it doesn't work! This reaction gave me hope about the future and that our kids will survive this age too!

The bad - Half finished animation. Did they run out of money? Were they teaching themselves how to use the newly purchased software on the job? There was a lot of good world building and character design, but a substantial amount of it look half finished and amateurish. The sound mix and the music. The orchestral score was fine, if averagely mixed, but the modern pop songs shoehorned into the film were jarring and really bad. They damaged the world building significantly and were a poor decision. Huxley. Wasn't a great character idea or that well played. I can see what they were going for but for the bio part of it he could have been better than a dumb teenager in a misshapen frankestein's monster body. The Good Tesla. She was pretty good, the best looking of the animated characters, and interestingly voice. -The world building. It was a pretty solid idea for a film, tech verse bio in a steam punk setting. Heavily influenced by iconic characters from history but not in a bad way apart from the clockwork orange droogs who had no reason to be in this world apart from the word clockwork in their source film title. The plague mask characters were suitably creepy, and the castle in the sky was interesting too. The Hals moving castle flapping flying machines were nicked but some of the other designs were original and interesting. Although it was half finished the city design and some of the locations were good. I think the animators over-reached their ability. There were some exciting camera angles attempted, but failed at. Just because you can move in a 3d way doesn't mean it looks cinematic. A more experienced team would know how to pull off the moves without it looking cheap. Obviously a lot of work went into making this film once you look past the lackluster parts. There's a lot of detail in there amongst the poorly rendered and badly moved animation. The next one will be better I'm sure. They wisely got some decent voice talent on board and they mostly delivered. I can see why people are jarringly shocked by the movie, but it isn't a one star effort, but it's not a 10 either. It's a generous 6-7. Please do better next time as the material deserves it.

As the only other real reviewer here (all the others appear to be directly connected with the movie) notes, the animation on this thing is absolutely horrendous - not even on par with video games from two decades ago. The poor animation might be acceptable to very young (under four years old) children, but then the story isn't entirely comprehensible by them - and older children who'll fully understand the story will very likely turn away because of the poor animation. All in all, great as an experiment but far from worthy of being published - the animators should spend the next couple of years learning how to actually use their newly-acquired animation software, lest they create another worthless pile like this one.

The animation and general finish ruins this movie. It could have been ok (at best) but it's not. The sound and animation post production has not been done. It's shoddy. A tax dodge? Find a trailer, you'll see what I mean