We Are the Strange

Someone here said not to watch this movie for the plot, but to watch it for the visuals. Follow that advice! This movie is is an amazing, beautiful, stunning, _painting with audio_. This is an amazing piece of art, but this is far from a "movie". This is a series of beautiful paintings set to great video game style audio and sound effects. This movie belongs in a gallery, not a theater.

I'm not a huge art fan so I didn't really enjoy this movie past the first 10 minutes. Actually, I gave up after 35 minutes and just turned off the laptop. The movie lacks a plot (at least one I could detect), and between the visuals I was left wondering "is this what people see when they're on acid?". It an amazing piece of art, but not something I would call entertainment.

I first saw a trailer of this movie while browsing on a independent movie/DVD website. I was fascinated by how it looked after reading that it had influences on Anime. The trailer said it was viewable on you-tube, so I went to the website to check it out.

The movie takes place inside a video game cartage, where the world is a grim dark video game world. There was a woman named Blue who was once a dancer for a vile man named Him. Him disowned Blue for not being attractive, and for having a strange condition that whenever she speaks she turns pix-elated, but if she remains silent she's not pix-elated. After being abused by Him, he tells her to get lost. Which Blue did as she ran away from the place that was considered home to her, but not anymore. She ran away from the city and ended up at a forest where she meets a lonely doll with the head of a baby doll. His name is eMMM and all he wants is Ice Cream and someone to be friends with. Blue wasn't too sure about eMMM, but eventually she gained his trust and they both decide to get ice cream. However their trip to get ice cream lead towards a dangerous adventure when they head for the city that's over run with monsters that were sent by Him himself.

After watching it, it became a new favorite of mine. Not only was it a well done independent animated film. It was also fascinating on how the director throw in various parodies of video games & anime. The main heroine Blue is one of the reasons I liked it a lot.

This movie is really strange, and it was created by a independent filmmaker who likes to do movies his own way. So it's not a movie made for everyone. In my opinion it's highly watchable if you like movies that have a Gothic/anime/video game theme to them.

You're able to watch the entire movie on Youtube, because the director wanted everyone to be able to watch the movie. If you like the movie, then there's a 2-dsic DVD which includes deleted scenes, alternate soundtracks, making of feature, & a commentary where you get to learn at least one new thing about the movie from the director himself.

It's not a well known movie to the public, but I'm sure within time, this movie will gain a large cult following like other movies do.

The man responsible for this film is called "M. Dot Strange."

That kind of gives you a hint of what you are going to see - something very "strange."

Listen: you'll either think this is super cool and love this film, or you'll get so disgusted you'll yank it off your screen within minutes. Actually, I was somewhere toward the latter, but I lasted longer than a half hour before losing interest. I really tried to like this.

The good aspect of this film is the clever animation done on a low budget. This is an original film, that's for sure. The visuals and the sound are different and mostly interesting. You also have the option of hearing various soundtracks - now that's unique!

The bad part of the movie is that it's hard to watch much of it in one sitting. It gets to be too much and is weak in the area of getting the viewer involved with the characters and story. Very little of the story is explained, so you can get lost in a hurry and never recover. After a while, I found myself not caring what was happening and just attempted to enjoy the strange visuals and sound- effects.

The visuals are a combination of computer-generated, stop motion and bluescreen effects. It is also a combination, according to its writer-director- producer-etc, of 8-bit and anime. I'm not versed enough in all of this to explain it. I'm just trying to give you an idea how different this film is from other animated movies you've seen.

Also, it was first released on the Internet instead of movie theaters, I think, but did play in the Sundance Film Festival in 2006 and the following year put out on DVD.

For the average movie viewer, this film would be torture to sit through. It would be a long hour-and-a-half. For someone who enjoys something different visually, this is a unique film that deserves a look and might prove to be fascinating, especially for some young person interested in becoming a filmmaker. I'm sure one could learn a lot of techniques and be inspired.

Finally I get to see We Are The Strange. I don't remember in the slightest how I came to know about M. Dot Strange's work, but overall I'm glad I did. What we have here is a technical achievement on a pretty high level. The story itself is simple, but at the same time, it's really hard to understand. I urge everyone thinking about seeing this movie to read up about what the movie is about first. If I didn't know the plot beforehand, I would have been completely and utterly bewildered right up until the end of the flick. But the plot isn't the reason to watch this film. It's the visuals and the sound. It's really like nothing I've ever seen, and most likely nothing you've seen as well. I enjoyed We Are The Strange due to it's imaginative art, music and style, but I still felt lost quite a bit...too much so. This is a movie for people who are artistic, imaginative and adventurous with their movie watching, everyone else should stay put.

About this time in October last year, M. Dot Strange (His stage name from when he used to do music) came up with an independent masterpiece that appeared on Youtube, an animated film called "We Are The Strange", which was merely only a trailer, but an intriguing trailer, indeed.

So, for almost a full year and a half, those that sat at their computers waited for the movie to go through Sundance. Fans (I, myself, included) among many others, were glued to the intriguing persona of M. Dot Strange, as he commented on those people who were looking at this movie, criticizing it good, criticizing it badly. Some people left within 15 minutes. Some stayed and watched the madness. For those who left, I feel very sorry for you. You missed an amazing piece of art.

We Are The Strange is a movie with a very simple plot, but presents itself in such a dazzling way that you have to seek to finish it, just to see the art. No matter how you criticize the film, you cannot deny that the art form, Str8nime, a new style of animation created by Strange himself, combines 8 bit animation (Like the old Mario Games on Nintendo) Anime (This stuff is nothing like what you see on TV. It's human in it's animated style) and Strangeness, and this movie provides plenty of it.

The story revolves around two main characters, Blue and Emm. Blue is an anime girl who worked, who lived in a bordello, whilst under the ownership of HIM (The voice of the Director), who tells her she is ugly, and will never be anything to him or anyone. She is banished to a lonely forest, where the other character, Emm, a doll boy (A doll's body with a voice that squeaks and squeals for speech) lives alone in the forest. He does not know why he's there, or how he got there, but ponders it.

Under specific detail, Emm highlights he wants Ice Cream, and wants to go the big city to get it. Fear and torment plague his mind, as the idea of being an outcast is something he recognizes. Blue, too, feels this way.

As the two go to Stopmo City, they find that evil lurks everywhere, and only a strange fighter named Rain appears to fight the darkness around the city.

This movie is brilliant. It's not for everybody, but it is fantastic. The art is just dazzling, the visuals are what tell the story, and it's not just a fan's review that's saying this, as a movie goer, it's nothing Pixar has ever done. Shrek cannot compete to what this movie tries to say.

If you need to see a movie that is brimming with genius, has an intelligent way of story telling (This does not have much dialog, and that's good, because instead of clouding your mind with meaningless George Lucas-esquire lingo, you can focus on a bitter and at the same time, sweet movie.

I give this movie a 9/10.