We Are the Strange (2007)

Someone here said not to watch this movie for the plot, but to watch it for the visuals. Follow that advice! This movie is is an amazing, beautiful, stunning, _painting with audio_. This is an amazing piece of art, but this is far from a "movie". This is a series of beautiful paintings set to great video game style audio and sound effects. This movie belongs in a gallery, not a theater.I'm not a huge art fan so I didn't really enjoy this movie past the first 10 minutes. Actually, I gave up after 35 minutes and just turned off the laptop. The movie lacks a plot (at least one I could detect), and between the visuals I was left wondering "is this what people see when they're on acid?". It an amazing piece of art, but not something I would call entertainment.

Being a fan of unusual movies, I decided to go and watch We Are the Strange when it was shown at Leeds Film Festival. Unfortunately, this movie is not strange in a good or interesting way. The plot is pretty much non-existent and if it wasn't for the lengthly character description at the beginning of the movie, it would be nothing more than complete confusion in cinematic form. Although the random mismatch of animation styles used in this movie creates a sense of chaos which is fitting to the world in which the film is based, this does not make for good watching and becomes repetitive very quickly. Some people praise the mixture of animation styles and lack of a plot as 'thinking out of the box'. However, thinking out of the box is not always a good thing. For instance, if I decided to cook myself something new by combining elements of different world cuisines, the result might be: a fish, beef and pasta pie seasoned with typical Indian spices and topped off with a rich chocolate and Weetabix sauce. This would be thinking out of the box, but would anyone want to eat it?All this movie achieves, is to portray its creator's (M dot Strange) self-indulgence. M dot Strange would have saved a lot of time, both for himself and others, if he had simply made the visuals for a five minute music video. There is an obvious reason why most people don't make whole movies by themselves - the results will be unwatchable!

Finally I get to see We Are The Strange. I don't remember in the slightest how I came to know about M. Dot Strange's work, but overall I'm glad I did. What we have here is a technical achievement on a pretty high level. The story itself is simple, but at the same time, it's really hard to understand. I urge everyone thinking about seeing this movie to read up about what the movie is about first. If I didn't know the plot beforehand, I would have been completely and utterly bewildered right up until the end of the flick. But the plot isn't the reason to watch this film. It's the visuals and the sound. It's really like nothing I've ever seen, and most likely nothing you've seen as well. I enjoyed We Are The Strange due to it's imaginative art, music and style, but I still felt lost quite a bit...too much so. This is a movie for people who are artistic, imaginative and adventurous with their movie watching, everyone else should stay put.

About this time in October last year, M. Dot Strange (His stage name from when he used to do music) came up with an independent masterpiece that appeared on Youtube, an animated film called "We Are The Strange", which was merely only a trailer, but an intriguing trailer, indeed.So, for almost a full year and a half, those that sat at their computers waited for the movie to go through Sundance. Fans (I, myself, included) among many others, were glued to the intriguing persona of M. Dot Strange, as he commented on those people who were looking at this movie, criticizing it good, criticizing it badly. Some people left within 15 minutes. Some stayed and watched the madness. For those who left, I feel very sorry for you. You missed an amazing piece of art.We Are The Strange is a movie with a very simple plot, but presents itself in such a dazzling way that you have to seek to finish it, just to see the art. No matter how you criticize the film, you cannot deny that the art form, Str8nime, a new style of animation created by Strange himself, combines 8 bit animation (Like the old Mario Games on Nintendo) Anime (This stuff is nothing like what you see on TV. It's human in it's animated style) and Strangeness, and this movie provides plenty of it.The story revolves around two main characters, Blue and Emm. Blue is an anime girl who worked, who lived in a bordello, whilst under the ownership of HIM (The voice of the Director), who tells her she is ugly, and will never be anything to him or anyone. She is banished to a lonely forest, where the other character, Emm, a doll boy (A doll's body with a voice that squeaks and squeals for speech) lives alone in the forest. He does not know why he's there, or how he got there, but ponders it.Under specific detail, Emm highlights he wants Ice Cream, and wants to go the big city to get it. Fear and torment plague his mind, as the idea of being an outcast is something he recognizes. Blue, too, feels this way.As the two go to Stopmo City, they find that evil lurks everywhere, and only a strange fighter named Rain appears to fight the darkness around the city.This movie is brilliant. It's not for everybody, but it is fantastic. The art is just dazzling, the visuals are what tell the story, and it's not just a fan's review that's saying this, as a movie goer, it's nothing Pixar has ever done. Shrek cannot compete to what this movie tries to say.If you need to see a movie that is brimming with genius, has an intelligent way of story telling (This does not have much dialog, and that's good, because instead of clouding your mind with meaningless George Lucas-esquire lingo, you can focus on a bitter and at the same time, sweet movie.I give this movie a 9/10.