Back to Gaya

Back To Gaya, otherwise known as Boo, Zino and The Snurks, is a perfectly respectable effort at producing a computer animated movie outside the confines of Hollywood. I saw this the day after I watched Shark Tale, and found this to have far more sympathetic characters and.. dare I say it.. better animation? There is so much detail on in each scene, like paper blowing down the street or moths buzzing around a lantern, it puts previous effort's static backgrounds to shame. This is even more amazing when you consider this was probably was made on a tenth of the budget as it's aforementioned Dreamworks brother. Sadly, the script lacks humour and memorable lines.. unless you think quotes like "This place is so scary it would give a ghost goose-pimples" are ones for the ages. There is a lot of action, and a few tense moments that will have the sprogs biting their nails, but there were also some parts which went on for too long, and others which could have been cut altogether. This is what separates Pixar from the pretenders.. when they do a motion picture, they make sure the quality of the screenplay is just as good as the technology, something the producers of Back To Gaya seem to have forgot. Still, there is a refreshing lack of sentimentality usually associated with this genre, and Patrick Stewart and Emily Watson do well as the only recognisable voiceovers in the English dub. Overall, this probably not worth paying to watch in the cinema (A sentiment a lot of people agree with me on apparently.. It's flopping in the UK) but it is well worth a rental, particularly if your kids have worn out everything else you have on tape. A sound-as-a-pound 6 outta 10 from me..

Let me start by saying that the animated movie Snurks. Back to Gaya should not be watched by children. Unless you want to explain why the mean little snurk calls people a "putz". Or why the movie is dark and dreary like a new Batman movie. In order to enjoy this movie you must understand that this is a religious allegory with a some very bad ethnic references, the requisite "a female can be a hero too" story line, and a cookie cutter plot.

As far as a CG movie it is good. Not very good, but it has some terrific details. If you like to see pimples, pores, a stray nose hair, and blemishes then you will be impressed by the graphics. The bonus feature is kind of neat because you can watch how they build a skeleton, add "skin", texture, muscle movement, and facial features.

Did I already state that this is not a movie for kids? The story involves a "creator" (Patrick "Jean Luc Picard"), a mythical land where good battles evil (Eden, er, Goya), the good guys need "the light", ("dalamite"). The dalamite gets stolen by an evil genius with a limp and (don't be shocked) a big, bald head!! Lemme explain: evil will take away the light and you have to find the creator to get it back. If you don't get it back then you will be a putz (they said it, not me). Explain that to your kids.

Whose bright idea was it to give the poor little Snurks a shot glass filled with a Mickey? That's right, the Snurks get drugged by a tank-top wearing bar owner. I'm no censor but I know for a fact that cleavage does not belong in a kids movie.

Just to keep adults interested, the artists have decided to show you lot of the barmaid's cartoon cleavage and sagging you-know-whats. I know for another fact that sagging you-know-whats do not belong in a kids movie. And the barmaid's male lackey gets yelled at, scolded, called a putz, then kicked in the head. Way too much violence.

And they didn't miss a chance to make fun of fat people, short people, and anyone that looked different than heros. Sure, they had to cooperate to get back to Eden, er, Goya, but the snurk leader still had to bribe the "creator" to get equal treatment.

And why does "666" keep popping up in the background? Did I like it? Not really. I wish I didn't see it with my kids. What a putz (their words, not mine) I am.

I've heard the producers say: "Hey, we don't want to be 'like Pixar' or like anything else ... !"

OK. But in 2004 you have to reach certain technical standards. And the makers of "Gaya" didn't. The kinematics is wooden, the camera movements make you dizzy and the lip-sync is disastrous. I mean -- this is a German CGI movie, so why are the German voices out of sync? Even movies like "Shrek" or "Ice Age" have been dubbed with German voices without visible glitches like that.

Aside from the technique: It's a nice animation film, but the plot is a bit thin and the characters are a bit weak. "Back to Gaya" is OK, but it's not more than that.

The Computer Graphic in this movie were sometimes sooo good that I kept trying to figure out how such quality effects were used in a movie with such terribly poor pacing, story, and plot. The quality of the scenes was often on par with Shrek or even Monsters Inc. I would watch a scene thinking this could be a professional studio doing this film (that I never heard of in mainstream media), then I would see the characters do a scene that would no longer pass as adequate in a Saturday Morning Special.

Maybe it was the difficulty of working with CGI characters. Its possible that because the film was made in German and then English audio was dubbed that caused the audio track to be off throughout the film. I never realized how spoiled we've become with films like Toy Story, Shrek, Nemo, Antz, and so on. This film had several sweeping scenes that I thought could have been right out of any of those films, but then cut to action that could not have been in a storyboard for one of those films.

Beautiful scenes, but lacks the wittiness and pacing that would allow an adult to enjoy this movie.

The movie does have significant weaknesses, as the other comments point out, but there are a few strengths worthy of note.

I was positively impressed by the global level of detail of scene backgrounds. Where in other CGI movies you get to see, say, a row of buildings with carefully modelled details near the camera, then a lot of empty space behind those, and finally a matte painting of the 'horizon', Back to Gaya shows you whole blocks of buildings, with the next streets showing through the gaps, all in credibly full detail, but without any obvious repetition of similar structures. To me these shots had a sense of realism that I had not seen before in CGI movies.

Along the same vein, when there are open air views, the distant landscape is never a simple background painting, but a detailed model. As far as I can tell, even the clouds in the sky were actual 3D entities instead of the usual flat background painting. This gives the camera a lot more freedom to move large distances and freely look around the scenery. The filmmakers probably overused this freedom somewhat, though, making some scenes hard to follow.

The outstanding level of detail extends to things like vegetation interacting with buildings, like plants growing inbetween and around fenceposts, for example. What I also liked was the general worn and aged look of things, a refreshing change from the polished featureless surfaces that are all too common on CGI movies' background objects.

The character animation in comparison is two classes below that, as the other comments mention. One thing I like about the characters, though, is the courage of the designers to go for the outright bizarre with the 'human' roles. It was interesting to see character design exploring a different direction than the usual either hyperrealistic or more classical comic style.

So, despite its weaknesses, Back to Gaya actually manages to advance the state of the CGI art on a few fronts. I do hope that it will be commercially successful enough that the makers get another chance to apply their talents to a better story.