Amazing trains is a title I regret picking up. I first discovered this film when my friend pointed it out to me in our local movie rental store. The case looks like if could be a spinoff of the Cars series by Pixar, but it turns out it is more of an informational video that would be seen in a kids section of a train depot (if that even exists). The feature starts off well with a good quality animated sequence of a toy train running along wooden toy track similar to toy wooden play tables for trains. The animation gives off a toy story vibe and is honestly the best part of this film. This film uses choppy and slow transitions when changing topics and is very repetitive throughout the entire movie. This movie bounces between animated and realistic scenes and after 3 transitions it is just plain annoying. The character named "ChooChoo" (seen on cover) is only seen 3-4 times within the film with the same animation, coming from the left or right of the screen, centering, and then bouncing around in the middle of the screen. A lot of the animation is pointless and overused. occasionally the train from the transition slides will chug across the bottom of the screen for no reason, I know its the train from the title sequence because the wheel on the train stop moments before it leaves the right of the screen and you can see the crane move as if were to pick up another title slide. There is once animation that completely befuddled me, it was a train seeming to go around a planet and eventually cut off when reaching a tunnel, the context behind this is honestly little to none other than its related to trains. Moving on to the realistic portion of this movie, The shots of the trains are good quality and tranquil, there is only two issues I see with the realistic portions is that the camera doesn't track the trains well and can be shaky at times and not really smooth. The other issue is the sheer repetitiveness of scenes. if you count how many times you've seen the same clip of the time lapsed front of train shot, you would count at least 6-8 times. This repetition is honestly unnoticeable until about 20 minutes into the movie. The last 27-ish minutes of this movie is literally all the clips this film contains filling the run time to meet movie standards. Moving on to the narrator, the narrator is a nice friendly girl with a very educational tone to her voice; extremely kid oriented, the only issue I have is the volume in which she is heard, she needs to be a bit louder. Overall I'd rather be watching Food Fight rather than this movie due to its rather repetitive scenes and slow moving feel.
