Coriander & A Penny's Worth of Lonesome

Let's start with the good things. This is an animation and a drama and they decided to render everything in black and white, which automatically sets the movie as different and artistic. Let's remember how Michael Cacoyannis shot "Zorba the Greek" in 1964 all in black and white, despite colors were fully available at this time, but no - he shot with no colors and it looks so awesome! Favorite movie of mine. So here they decided to render the entire movie with grey-scale only. So far so good. Story is set in 1926 USA and while at first I was not familiar at all, I decided to run my own fact checks and discovered that the story uses some bits and pieces based on true events. I will try to reveal no spoilers, but in short - we see the story of Coriander - orphaned young and aspiring actress and her step-brother, who is madly in love with her and dreaming for the lights of Hollywood. This is a drama - shattered dreams and an impossible love. However the story actually speculates with the real mystery around the dead of Rudolph Valentino - Italian actor, lived in USA, legend of the silent cinema. This is a true story - he was beloved by many and after his death, each year there was a lady in black, bringing flowers to his grave. Now there are actually four ladies running for the title, but history mainly credits Ditra Flame and while most would call Ditra the Lady in Black, the director decided to speculate with the story, add a little "what if" and put our little orphaned actress in the rivalry for the title. The story is actually the best thing in the movie.

I can clearly see the nostalgia in this movie. The characters are designed to look and move a bit like in the old stop-motion animation movies and mr. Grant also shares this nostalgia of his in a video you could find on YouTube. I am not sure if "Grand Guignol Productions" is his own company, but the entire movie smells of not hundred, but a thousand percent nostalgia of the good old and weird. For the not familiar - Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was a theater, which closed in 1962 in Paris, known for weird horror shows. The logo of this company comes from "Death Records", the imaginary record company in "The Phantom of Paradise" (1974). Then we get the black and white in the entire movie, we add some old songs, we exploit an old story and we end up with a total nostalgia, which is great, I actually salute such ideas. I also did some research on the director himself and watched nearly all available videos and shorts on his own YouTube channel, so I can see he is a lover of weird and good.

The characters are overall good, but there is a room for development. Dialogues are fine. Music is okay. The best in the music is they made use of the 1926 Vernon Dalhart song "There's A New Star In Heaven Tonight", which is an actual song dedicated to Rudolph Valentino, which adds even more authenticity to the movie. The other nice thing is they decided to stuck to the old school movie lengths - the 90 minute mark.

Now - the bad things. Problem is there are just few bad things, but they are so significant, they ruined nearly the entire experience of watching this movie.

Character 3D design. I am not sure exactly what software was used to design the characters, the props and to put all of it together and finally render it. But it is not good. Neither of it. So characters have big heads, with very skinny (most of them) bodies. We could say the body contours are exaggerated to look weird and this is not bad. Actually it imediatelly strikes memories of the 60s-70s stop-motion animation characters and from this point of view everything is totally fine. What is not fine is they do not look smooth. Nothing in the graphics and animation look smooth. Something which I really disliked is the ankle bracelet. In the beginning of the movie, Coriander gets a bracelet from her step-mother. Later she haves this bracelet on her ankle. This is visible like another 3D prop added to the character leg model and does not look nice. It would have been much better if it was just added to the leg texture. Maybe they wanted it to be more clearly noticeable, but still.

The first funeral scene. In the very beginning of the movie we have the funeral scene, where Coriander's father is in the burial home, there is a priest giving a service, everybody are there and they ask Coriander to sing a song, after which they joyfully applauded her. Oh my! Who does this? While I am from a Christian Orthodox background, I actually attended North American funerals too, some of them protestant. Nobody applauds on a funeral service, at least I've never seen it. That scene shocked me.

Animation flaws. This is huge. Animation is real bad here. I can see on Julian Grant's YouTube channel that animation is a flaw in his other 3D movies too. His 2D movies are fine. In the very last one "Sif's Folly" it looks more polished, but even there are flaws, which are fully present in this movie too - the character animation is not smooth, except on few dancing scenes. The most striking flaw is on the Rudolph Valentino funeral scene, where he is in the coffin and Coriander goes to see him for first time after he is dead - movie timer is around 53:09. Shocking moment, obviously missed by the movie team - we have a corpse WITH OPEN EYES, which as Coriander approaches the corpse, the corpse BLINKS TWICE!! Nope, not joking here. The corpse is with eyes open and blinks twice. I watched the scene two times to verify it and it looks horrible, not just because we talk of a corpse, but also because in just few seconds we learn this is even not an actual corpse. Another serious miss. Obviously the movie team never did an actual quality assurance. Another animation flaw is the character movement. Often the models walk or otherwise move, without this to be in synchronized with the environment. Example - character walks and while one foot is supposed to be stuck on the ground, we see either it glides with the ground being stationary or the ground moves faster than the character foot moves. This could be also seen in Julian's last YouTube short "Sif's Folly".

The rendering. For those not familiar - "rendering" is the process of having some scenes made of 3D models (let's say characters), some props (furniture, trees, etc.), background, textures, cameras, lights and putting it all together as a 2D video file, ready to be seen by the audience. This is usually done on a separate computer, much more powerful than the other production computers, as it takes lots of memory, processing power, speed and time to do it. Well Coriander does not gets it well. Nothing is smooth here. I sometimes get the impression the movie is black and white not for the nostalgia, but to hide the rendering flaws, because the entire movie looks like it was rendered at the most with Quake III (or Unreal II) engine on a Windows 98 computer. Or a 2014 student laptop at the most. It is actually worse. Remember the famous Dire Straits music video "Money for Nothing"? It is a 1986 video. And back then the team with such a limited computer resources got it so right, so smooth and so awesome. Well, not Coriander in 2019. Nothing moves smooth. We can clearly see on scenes where the environment is more spacey and there is a lot of movement, especially where the camera follows the characters and the entire room "spins", they move worse than the zombies in "The Walking Dead". There are few exceptions - the dancing scene with the two ladies, which could be seen on the trailer - this is nearly smooth, then there are I think two scenes where man and woman dance together and close - these seem nearly smooth too. Everything else is not. Not to speak - near the end of the movie there are few scenes where there is a crowd, the camera is set from apart. The crowd moves without the bodies to move, they just glide. Most of them had no textures too.

Maybe I am spoiled. I am a Senior Software Developer and while I don't do animation myself, I actually spent nearly four years in the company owning Nelvana Animation studio. Nope, I am not anymore associated with them in any way. But being close to Nelvana and watching so many animated movies over the years on YouTube, I really expect more from a production released full-blown animation. If it was a short for YouTube I would not mind and would never mention anything of what I just wrote. But we are not talking about some student YouTube short, we talk about an experienced director and a production release. I could see, from his other works he is very talented, but obviously 3D technologies are not his strongest thing. I would also totally understand a lack of budget, but it could not be such an issue - let's remember the 2012 "Iron Sky" - it became famous for crowd-sourcing and crowdfunding and it looks totally awesome! It took years, I could live with this. Even some YouTube shorts made by small teams look amazing. So technology should not be an excuse for a full-blown production release. Not in 2021.

So while this movie have a good start, very interesting story, cute characters and does a nice reverence to the good old and weird, I can't close my eyes to the significant flaws it shows. If you're up for some little weirdness, I would recommend watching this. Not otherwise. I seriously hope Julian Grant would spent more time on the character models and especially the animations from now on and gets at least one quality assurance person. I would love to see anything new from him. There are some really good things on his YouTube channel to be seen.

Thank you.