So where does this film fall flat on its face? Well for one thing, the animation is shoddy - most noticeably the motion capture technique used to animate the film. Nothing is more bothersome and unpleasant than the brain telling you someone’s movement, their actions and their body is slightly wrong. It’s like looking at an Escher drawing and being unsettled because your brain is constantly confused by what you see.
There are moments of clarity and beauty in the movie, but they are few and far between. What we find instead is that Computer animation has sanitized future Paris and turned it into a box model. If I could have made any decision about the animation at the beginning I would have laid down the law and said this is being done by hand, no two ways about it. I’ve found the recent trend in Computer animated films quite depressing, but on the other hand mixed media films which combine hand and Computer have excited me greatly.
My biggest gripe with Renaissance apart from it’s animation is the film’s indecisiveness about what it is. The producers obviously wanted to add some Hollywood Factor and so at points in the film the cliché runs thick and free, and you begin to wonder whether it’s a French film you sat down to watch. I have a deep respect for French film, so seeing this desperate kowtow to the HW Gods sickened me. The potential for a deeper and more revealing observation of human mortality and it’s value - which is one of the themes of the film - is lost in a hail of bullets.
Renaissance is in my opinion one of the worst kind of films, those that could have been something special, but failed. Every step of the way though it falls short of its goal and in doing so becomes mediocre.
