A Trash Movie About Trash: City of Lost Things
By Yiler Huang
This Tuesday, we went on a field trip and watched a movie. The movie was called City of Lost Things. I think that was not so good, compared with other 3D animation movies I have watched before. It has a good topic, but the director didn't know how to represent it. So I don't suggest you to watch the movie. Then, let me introduce the movie to you and tell you that why you shouldn't watch it.
City of Lost Things is a 3d animation movie, which is the type that most Taiwan cartoon styled movies are using. When I first saw the poster, I already stoped expect the movie is good, because there were too many bad Taiwan 3D animations movies. This one as well. I think the animation looks unnatural, the characters looked numb and slow. sometimes it was not that realistic when a character wanted to grab something. I think this shouldn't be the ten years prepared movie quality.
Usually, the technique of making animation will get better every year. But if you compared some old 3D animation movies, you will see that the movie was not so good. Then, the lines is the movie was very very unnatural. Because they had no normal conversations, all the lines were about the main story line. I think that made all the characters looked boring and dead, and it was hard to know their personality through their conversation. The next point is: the characters other than the main characters were not important. Many of the characters in the movie didn't talk, even once. So I think it was no need to use these characters, because it only made the characters and the whole environment in the movie look dead. The last point is: the goal of the characters. I know that there is a way to write a story called “Hero's journey”, and many good movies used this way (example: Star Wars). The first step of the Hero's journey is “what a character want”, but I think City of Lost Things already messed up with the first step. Because the goals of the characters were keep changing unreasonable. In the beginning, the goal of the character was against the trucks that gathers trashes. But in the last, the goal turned into be recycled. It is like the plastic bag character read the scrip and suddenly had a new goal. At last, I want to tell you another funny problem. Their translation. There was one part that the bag wanted to “turn into something”, and he thought he can turn into something magically if he reached Taipei. And they translate the Chinese word “變”, which means turn into something, into Abracadabra. I remember that Abracadabra is a spell in Harry Potter, and the spell is for hurting someone. But the translation person though it means turn into something, which was quite funny.
I think if the movie wants to get improve, it needs more reactions of different characters. I think the movie has too many explanation conversations, so the director needs to work on that. For example, there is a drama called Arcane on Netflix, it is a drama about the game League of Legends. I think the director used the things characters did to introduce the world instead of a lot of boring conversations, I can easily see the background through every characters, even though I don't play League of Legends. Then, I think the characters need a clear goal and not to change it that much. Because the characters in the movie changed their goal very much, so the whole movie looked like many different movies acted by the same characters. I think what made this was that the director wanted to make some character arc to make the story more interesting, but he or she messed up so the goals or the characters were keep changing.
At last, I don't suggest you to watch the movie. Because in some way, it was a terrible movie. Because I think there are more better movies on the theater to watch. So, save your money, and don't watch this movie. I think you won't learn much in this movie, and there were too many meaningful movies waiting for you to watch.
《廢棄之城》：一部不好看的電影
這個星期二，我們去校外教學看了一場電影。這部電影叫《廢棄之城》。與我之前看過的其他 3D 動畫電影相比，我認為這不符合我的期待。導演選了一個很棒的題材，但我覺得他不知道怎麼表達。所以我不建議你去看電影。然後，我要向你介紹這部電影，和告訴你為什麼你不應該看。
廢棄之城是一部3D動畫電影，是台灣卡通風格電影最氾濫的類型。第一眼看到海報的時候，我就不怎麼期待電影好看了，因為台灣3D動畫壞的例子太多了。這部電影也是。我認為動畫看起來不自然，角色看起來麻木而緩慢。特別是當角色想要抓住某些東西時會看起來不太真實。我認為這不應該是準備了十年的電影的品質。
通常，製作動畫的技術會逐年提高。但是如果你比較一些老的3D動畫電影，你就會發現這部電影的品質卻無法和以前好的動畫作品相提並論。然後，電影中的台詞非常不自然。因為他們沒有正常的對話，所以所有的台詞都是關於主要故事的。我覺得這讓所有角色都看起來死氣沉沉的，很難通過他們的談話了解他們的性格。下一點是：除了主要角色之外的角色根本不重要。電影中的許多角色都沒有說話，一次都沒有。所以我認為沒有必要使用這些角色，因為它只會讓電影中的角色和整個環境看起來很冷清。最後一點是：人物的目標。我知道有一種寫故事的方式叫做「Hero's Journey」，很多好電影都用這種方式（例如：星際大戰）。這種故事建構方式的第一步是「一個角色想要什麼」，但我認為廢棄之城已經把第一步搞砸了。因為角色的目標不斷變化很不合理。一開始，角色的目標是對抗收集垃圾的卡車。但最後，目標變成了回收。就好像角色讀了劇本，突然有了新的目標。
我覺得這部電影要進步，就需要更多不同角色的反應。我覺得這部電影有太多的解釋性對話，所以導演需要在這方面下功夫。比如Netflix上有一部叫做《奧術》的劇，是一部關於遊戲英雄聯盟的戲劇。我覺得導演用利用角色的行為來介紹這個世界，即使我沒有玩過英雄聯盟，我也可以很容易地通過每個角色的行為舉止了解故事背景。然後，我認為角色需要一個明確的目標。因為《廢棄之城》中的角色改變目標很多次，所以整部電影看起來就像很多不同的電影但角色是一樣的。
最後，我不建議你看這部電影。因為從某種意義上說，這是一部糟糕的電影。因為我覺得有更多更好的電影可以看。所以，省下你的錢，不要看這部電影。我想你不會在這部電影中學到很多東西，有太多有意義的電影等著你去看。
Image source: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13236576/