KZ Jirren The 6 years since this movie was released has seen a deluge of CG offerings yet Kaena still has it's place. It is charming, engaging and a great testament to, and strong encouragement for; outfits that don't have Hollywood/ Square Enix/ Pixar budgets.I particularly enjoyed Richard Harris's voice-acting- his voice had a compassionate and gentle quality that really made me feel for his character.Some of the scenes were a little overwhelming to the point where I couldn't quite make out what was happening but to be honest I didn't care- i was too busy ooh-ing and aah-ing.A happy hour and a half indeed.

Salvatore Portuesi That was the caption in the cable guide that got my attention. OK, so I'm a frustrated artist who can really appreciate the end result of CGI work. And it keeps getting better and better with each new release. I just caught this one on cable and missed it at the "one theater" that IMDb says it was shown at. Sure, the storyline has gaps and the characters could use more development but the artwork is state of the art and phenomenal. From an artist's point of view, drawing 16 frames per second to simulate motion has always been an overwhelming task but not with computers. It still takes an army of programmers but what they're doing today was impossible just a short time ago. The freedom of expression as evidenced by this work is truly unlimited. Every scene had me in awe. The delicate motion of bodies and fluids was mesmerizing. Now if they can only get people to look like real people instead of textured geometric shapes. One can only dream.

Andy (film-critic) I had so much hope for this film. I remember seeing the previews and thinking that this was going to be an amazing film filled with beautiful visuals and a groundbreaking and imaginative story. Well, I can honestly say that I was only half-right. This was a classic example of a movie that had the potential to stand out and become a force in the computer animated film genre, but instead fell short because it lacked in story and strong characters. With both of these lacking considerably, it was impossible to fully enjoy the perfect surroundings and surreal imagination (which was not missing from this film at all). Instead, what this film boiled down to was a fairly well endowed girl fighting to save her people from these sap creatures that wanted nothing more than to destroy a blue orb that they felt destroyed their people and planet. With all of this destroying and cross-referencing happening, it became obvious on how the directors lost track of their original target and instead found themselves all over the cinematic CGI-created map. So, let's begin with the characters. Our heroine, Kaena, was horribly voiced by Kirsten Dunst giving us this modernized voice for a very primitive character. I kept waiting to hear her say 'whatever' and get on her cell phone. The voice behind Kaena gave no depth to the characters or the surroundings. Every time she opened her mouth I kept cringing in my seat wondering why so much was spent on this mismatched voice. The only one that was worth listening to was Richard Harris who did a superb job behind Opaz, giving the right amount of age and wisdom to make us feel sympathy and delight for this strange creature. The rest were pure rubbish. They were all underdeveloped and uncared for which just pushed the overall tone for this film into disgust. I cared nothing for the villagers or even the villains. The reason, I knew nothing about them. How did these villagers evolve and why? Within a time of 600 years, the tree had inhabitants like humans, did anyone else find this odd. Also, who were the sap monsters? The lighting gave no accurate description and they gave us nothing to build on. Were they evil just to be evil? Somebody help me here! This apparent lack of development forced the ending to be nothing but dribble filled with sap and forced emotions.It became apparent about the middle of this film that the directors had jumped in way over their heads. They had built a world too big for them to handle or fully develop. With so much happening in this film and so many 'new' characters, I couldn't devote my attention to any specific one. Every scene gave us a new visual, and that may work in some films, but for Kaena it just gave us something new to see without any form of explanation. Who were the other inhabitants of the tree and why did they just show up randomly? How could the sap monsters control some and yet not others? What was the connection between all of these characters? My answer to this last question was that there wasn't any. The directors forced too much onto this film causing the pure basics of film-making to be lost. You will find when watching this film that scenes come uneven, fades between them are chaotic, and you never quite know where you will end up next. This creates a sense of uncertainty with the film that should not have been evident. This was no Final Fantasy, but instead an uneven wanna-be that had the potential, but never explored it. Kaena felt like that project that you had two weeks to work on, but somehow find yourself working on it the night before. The whole film seemed like a visual procrastination.I will give credit to one aspect of this film that I thought was enjoyable and that was the CGI graphics. I don't know who they had working on their team, but there were some beautiful moments to this film. Not all of it was above par, but there were just scenes that would linger in your mind for days. There also seemed like there were moments when the CGI would transform into regular animation for a brief second or so, I don't know if it was intentional or part of the story, but for me it worked. If the film would have combined these two styles, I think they would have had a stronger story. The dream sequences were some of the most creative I have seen in film lately. I was impressed of the visuals, but as I said before, the poor characters and story overshadowed them.Overall, this film could have been great. The imagination behind the story is there, almost on the tip of its tongue, but gets lost somewhere when too much food is forced into the mouth of the story and characters. I really wanted to enjoy this film, but I just couldn't get past this. The voices were mismatched and the story was just too overwhelming. I needed better voice actors and a better-knitted story. Also, perhaps if Kaena's breasts were just a bit less I could have appreciated her character a bit more. Whew, those were unnecessary unless the directors of his film were targeting young boys. They were, like the story, a bit too overwhelming.Grade: ** out of *****

0rganism OK, let's get the bad news out of the way right now. The plot is weak. There are some gaping silly holes in the story, numerous unexplained critter origins, shaky science, and a few threads that don't resolve at all. Automatic scoring deductions, across the board. So what's good about the movie? First, the graphics. This is the natural evolution of French animation, of which there isn't nearly enough. Rene' Laloux's "Fantastic Planet" is one of the all-time animated psychotropic classics, and there is much in this film that pays homage to it: the visuals of the Axis "forest", the xenomorphic life forms, the conflict between master and slave races, etcetera. At the same time, the animation technique is the sort of hyper-real CGI used in Final Fantasy/Spirits Within, where each hair follicle is individually rendered. Like these two sibling films, Kaena abounds with brilliant bong hit graphics and mind-bending action sequences. One common pitfall for animated features, particularly those of foreign origin, is the voice acting. To its immense credit, Kaena has a fairly decent dub, and I felt none of the accustomed grumpiness that comes with de-synced speech for any of the characters. The main characters were all well voiced. The IMDb cast list doesn't appear to mention all the voice actors, and I'm pretty sure the little kid was voiced by the same person who plays Shippo on Inuyasha (Jillian Michaels?). Sounds that way, at least.However, while the voice acting is fine, the same cannot be said for the dialog. Long in exposition and short in character development, I get the feeling that this was an editor's nightmare. The balance between ensuring that people understand events and helping them care about the consequences of those events can be a difficult one to achieve. This has been the bane of science fiction films since the genre's inception. Unfortunately, dialog in Kaena finds a way to fail on both sides of the equation -- albeit at different times. Without revealing any more details, I will say this much. The story tries to operate on a grand scale, but is undercut by the uneven development, jerky scene transitions, mediocre dialog, and the aforementioned plot-holes.This is a film to be enjoyed as a raw sensory experience, not as a total cinematic product. It's not going to end up on any top-20-all-time lists and its pretensions to epic film status are undercut by its many weaknesses.The overall effect, however, is extraordinary; it merits viewing as an exploration of what can now be accomplished with CGI. I enjoyed it immensely from this perspective, to the point where I was quite distracted from the numerous shortcomings.