Quote Originally Posted by LunaNaelyan View Post
Seriously, I don't really understand why people complain about this film. Not that it's the best animated film ever made, but it was enjoyable overall. About 70% of the haters are probably FF newbs who were expecting to see Cloud. The movie is based on Final Fantasy. If we don't count FFX-2 and the likes, every game has introduced a new world and set of characters, why should the movie be any different? Then again, most of those newbs expect to see Cloud in every FF. Sorry for the little rant, I just hate it when people don't check their facts. Anyway, I liked the movie a lot. The graphics were spectacular (although nowadays outdated by the likes of AC), the story and characters better than average. It definitely didn't deserve to bomb the way it did. But that's just my humble opinion.
I agree with almost everything that you said, save for the animation values. SW had far superior animation when compared with AC. Part of this is due to the fact that Nomura just doesn't know how to direct, and the choreography for every action scene was whack, even by fantasy standards. The second thing is that as wooden (in terms of animation) as some of the lesser scenes in SW were, AC is even worse most of the time with most scenes animating like the characters are marionettes, the animation was far more stiff and jerky in AC.

Also what the final fantasy VII fanboys don't get is that converting everything in the game into a movie would come off as stupid, as Advent Children proves. Games and novels can get away with more wacky fantasy stuff due to the fact it's easier to suspend disbelief, even though the story still must play a prevalent role. The way to pull off a good fantasy movie is to make the focus more about character (which SW did) than fantasy. Lord of the Rings and the better star wars films are good examples of this as the fantasy elements play secondary to character development and storytelling in these films. In advent, well we got bahamut, materia, airships, and limit breaks and Aerieth coming back from the dead about five or six times for no other reason save for the sake of Deus Ex Machina, and fight scenes desperately trying to be Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and well... those things sunk the story (what little there was) of advent quicker than an army of ice bergs converging on an unsinkable luxury liner.