Mr. Miao

I give 7/10 mainly because I'm so moved by the scene when Ding Guo went into Yun Xiang's room. Also the overall plot is very beautiful.

But overall I think this movie can do much much better, especially the second half. The story and the background settings might suit to hold a 2 hours long movie but to put them inside such a short length makes the storytelling very confusing somewhere. Two sets of "coupled" concepts are not individually developed and explained in a reasonable way.

Mr Miao could have done with a better title.

This film has Middling animation quality and some excellent effects, the music is beautiful throughout, and the visual style is a miss marsh of various other names of animation leaning heavily on studio ghibli. The characters move in a typical wuxia fashion and the action scenes, though lacking the tight animation to really punch, are well directed despite this.

The real strength of Mr Miao though is its plot and characters. The story is cosmic in scope and it's ambiguous morality is unique. The cast of characters is diverse and you empathize with almost every single one of them. Although there are many clichés, the constant questioning that the heroes are doing the right thing or that it serves any purpose really adds to the gravitas that these are people making choices rather than puppets, which the film promptly flips on its head at the very end in a highly intelligent way.

Besides the lacking animation quality, the film does lose a little bit of pace halfway through but it regains it towards the end, and admittedly the whole thing could have been 20 minutes longer.

All in all I can't fathom why this film is so poorly rated, it's one of the best animated features I've seen in a very long time, and it reminds me of Zhang Yimou's Hero, which is as flattering a comparison as I can make.

I love this film and I think if it had a blockbuster budget then it would have been a critical success.