zodiac race begins

Zodiac: The Race Begins

My new year resolution is to watch every made-in-Singapore commercial

movie that hits the big screen. Nearly accomplished that last year,

except that the chicken in me made me miss The Maid during the lunar

seventh month. But somehow alarm bells were already ringing about

Zodiac, touted as Singapore's first 3D animated movie.

Since it's the first, perhaps it's expected we go with expectations

set real low? Check. But it's really, not good. The animation is

rather coarse (ok, so you're telling me we cannot compare with

Pixar?), and looks like it's straight out of a bad blocky videogame.

There are certain sequences that looked like a cheap ripoff of old

puppetry techniques, though I'd like to think of it as an excuse that

the filmmakers were being lazy, or in a rush to finish this in time

for the lunar new year.

Too many "flipping-of-the-pages", and a narration voice over, to cover

up the fact that the storyline is relatively weak. Most of us would

already know that it was a race to decide the order of the animals in

the Chinese Zodiac, but this was a race that lacked one crucial

ingredient - excitement! The pace is pretty much flat, with no highs

or lows (more lows actually) to bring the audience into the race

proper.

The much touted voice of Fann Wong playing two characters - the cat

and the snake, will make you cringe. Most of the voices are rather

scratchy and sound amateurish, not to mention that the animated mouths

don't sync too. Given 12 key characters, a heavenly king and a tree

demon, there is a distinct lack of voice talents required. The

characters too are pretty weak, having the focus only on the rat and

the bull, while the others are pretty much forgotten and disposable.

It doesn't help by swinging the focus between groups of characters,

and the villain is probably the weakest link which poses no threat.

I wonder who did the subtitles, as it had loads of typographical and

grammatical errors. And I was surprised too that this movie actually

had an English track, recorded by local DJ Jamie Yeo, and some

unrecognizable others from the credits. Songs are part and parcel of

animated movies, but this one had really cringeworthy songs,

meaningless lyrics and having characters break into song and dance,

for the sake of doing so.

Is this a decent effort? I'm not sure, given the slip-shoddy