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Blue Elephant (The)
R1 - America - Genius Products Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (10th September 2008). |
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The Film
 The Film Advisory Board’s Award of Excellence has been slapped on a variety of films regardless of quality, rather it represents simply that the film is suitable for viewing by children meaning any movie with a G or PG rating is suddenly branding itself with titles like “award-winning.” Now comes “The Blue Elephant” (or “Kahn Kluay” in Thailand) (2006) a CG animated film from Thailand, with a large “award-winning” label from the Film Advisory Board. Mostly this award results form the fairly tame plot that is like a more childish version of “The Lion King” (1994) or “Bambi” (1942) but with elephants and incredibly plastic looking CG. In a small elephant community a baby is born and named Kahn Kluay (Thomas Sharkey) who is destined to become a great warrior for the kingdom of Siam which has been at war with Burma for many years. Kahn’s father disappeared during one of the last skirmishes and disappeared never to be seen again. One day Kahn goes looking for his father and gets hurt and is taken in by a local village, when he tries to return to his family they have all gone and so Kahn grows up with the villiagers. Khan grows up to be a strong elephant and tries to become a great fighter to avenge his father and help his people in the war with Burma. Much of the style of animation is fairly stiff and overly-shiny, but as the film goes on it becomes more of a glaring technical problem more than stylistic choice and gets visually frustrating after a while. Equally stiff is the voice acting which includes names like Martin Short and Carl Reiner who, along with the rest of the cast, sound like their parts were recorded over a good phone connection as they were falling asleep. Even Short who is known for being like a less hairy and less energetic (and less funny) Robin Williams sounds apathetic and disconnected from the film as he tries to play the zany messenger and fight trainer for the Thai government forces. In the animation style itself there are some large problematic aspects as well, such as the way some of the characters are designed. In the scene where Khan attempts to find his father in a Burmese camp, the camp commander resembles a drastic Asian stereotype that resembles World War II era United States propaganda posters targeted at Prime Minister Tojo of Japan. Almost all of the Burmese people in the film take on this or one type of caricature or another. Thankfully the voice acting doesn’t explore this territory further, but the fact that this type of imagery somehow deserves an uncritical “award of excellence” simply because the film contains no overt depictions of sex or violence is disquieting and unsavory. Similarly disheartening is the way that Jim Henson’s name gets plastered all over the box of this CG film. Though it’s a “Jim Henson Company” presentation seeing his name, which is a shining example of what practical effects can do over computer generated, is now being plastered on the box art of these poorly animated works is almost hurtful. Even in terms of just the plot the film tries to do the whole growing up in the shadow of your father dilemma which just doesn’t come across well at all and the film is just overall at best disinteresting and at worst distasteful.
Video
The film is presented in 1.33:1 full screen aspect ratio, which is the original aspect ratio according to the box art. Much of the film looks clean in terms of transfer, however as I’ve mentioned the problems in the actual animation of the film seems under funded and rushed creating a fairly shoddy product. Most of the characters are overly shiny and move too stiffly, leaving the final product feeling fairly sloppy and stiff.
Audio
Presented with an English Dolby Digital 5.1 sound track the quality is fine, but the content is lacking, especially the bored tones of the voice acting I mentioned earlier. The music available in the film is nothing really worth listening to, it kind of gets in the way of some of the dialogue. There’s also a heavy use of the cartoony sound effects, which is perfectly fine, unless they sound oddly loud like they do in “The Blue Elephant.” There are also optional subtitles in English for the hearing impaired and Spanish.
Extras
Genius Products has included no real extras outside of two startup bonus trailers for: - “The Goldie Locks and the 3 Bears Show” runs for 54 seconds. - “Tortise vs. Hare” runs for 1 minute and 39 seconds.
Overall
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