Review: 'Alpha and Omega'
The documentation of Alpha and Omega (trailer) is as much a cliché as the content. Its closing disclaimer assures us that the story is completely fictitious; all well and good, yet it continues with: "No identification with actual .... products is intended or should be inferred."
This could only have been added out of tradition, as this is little more than a rip-off of prior animated films, Disney's in particular. The only difference is that the originals did a good job.
This isn't a well-known studio's production (indeed the credits say that it's split between the US and India) and unfortunately that is very clear. While the scenery looks rather good, the wolves – intended to be the focus of your attention – needed a lot more detail in their models. This is particularly noticeable in the tails, which often seem to have been tacked on at the end; and worse, in an incredibly poor design choice, their hair. Wolves don't have human head hair, and its inclusion does not do the characters any favours.
Most characters don't stand out on their own in any way; the exceptions are sometimes for the wrong reasons. Eve (Kate's mother), for example, stands out for having a nose at least twice the size of anyone else in the film. Despite her lack of aesthetic appeal, she makes up for it with one or two good lines:
If any of you wolves have hurt my daughter, I will personally rip out your eyes and shove them down your throat so you can see my claws tear your carcass open!
Character-wise, nearly everyone is unbelievably shallow. You don't need to spend more than a few seconds listening to their lines to learn everything there is to know about them. The one exception is Lilly, who we see keep her feelings a secret. Humphrey, who as a main character ought to be one of the more complicated ones, is a joker; apart from that, there's really nothing more to him. He has feelings for Kate, but there is no subtlety, and never any real 'feel' to them.
The story is decent, but it's been seen a thousand times before. Aside from being derivative, the biggest disappointment is how the quadrupedal characters occasionally feel the need to stand on two legs and dance. They look even worse in that pose and The Lion King showed it was entirely possible to have an excellent quadrupedal dance sequence.
Following on that thought: Disney made a point to include songs, often excellent ones, into their films. Alpha and Omega didn't copy that though, which worked against them. In a train scene, which reminded me of Spirit's train scene in Spirit: Stallion Of The Cimarron, we get a strange choral howling and symphonic music. This is a really beautiful scene; you can feel a climax building, a climax that could be reached with a powerful song. Instead we scrabble on the lower slopes of the peak, failing to climax and abruptly changing tone, as well as seeing the animators stretching events (again) to conveniently suit the plot.
If I had to find a single unique feature in the story, it would have to be the lack of an evil character. There is a conflict between two wolf packs, but neither comes off as bad; one of them is just a bit mental. Strangely, there is no second-in-command to balance the leadership and the packs blindly do what they are told, which makes the ending a laughable, bipolar, roller-coaster of battles and peace over the smallest issues. It isn't even slightly satisfying, as no one seems to have much reaction to near-death of one of the pack members and the viewer is left with a bunch of questions about issues that the film appears to have just forgotten.
In the end, Alpha and Omega seems less like a proper film and more like a film student spent his time cutting together his favourite scenes from old Disney films and, when told that wasn't allowed, changed it enough to look slightly different. If it were a parody, it would have succeeded. As it's own film, it is a failure. It can still be enjoyed, perhaps especially in a group where you play 'spot the inspiration.'
About the author
Rakuen Growlithe — read stories — contact (login required)a student and Growlithe (Pokemon) from South Africa, interested in science, anime and power metal
I'm a fur from South Africa. I got into the fandom through my interest in pokemon, still a major part of my involvement, and writing fanfiction, though now I also try my hand at art from time to time. I've spread myself out over a number of sites including forums and furry news sites. Outside of furry and the aforementioned subjects I'm interested in science, anime (and am learning Japanese) and power metal.
Comments
Yes, this film was hilariously bad.
I'd have to agree.
It's not the kind of movie you'd honestly enjoy in a vacuum, but rather one that's good to get together with friends and riff on.
Uncanny valley.
That is all.
Wikipedia's article on "Alpha and Omega" says, "Produced on a $20 million budget, the film has been declared a financial success, and is Lionsgate's highest-grossing animated feature to date." Can we expect a sequel, then?
D:)
Yup. If you go onto Crest Animation Production's Wikipedia page it says Alpha and Omega 2 will be coming in 2012-2013.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
~Evelyn Beatrice Hall~
D:
THAT IS NOT THE THE UNCANNY VALLEY.
THE UNCANNY VALLEY IS NOT THE END-ALL, BE-ALL OF CREEPINESS.
IN FACT, THE UNCANNY VALLEY IS, BY DEFINITION, A VERY SMALL, VERY SPECIFIC PART OF THE "CREEPY" TERRAIN.
The "Uncanny Valley" effect occurs when something approaches near human, but is a little off. The vast majority of characters in Alpha and Omega are nowhere near human, so do not fall into the terrain of the Uncanny Valley.
I don't know why Uncanny Valley is always capitalized, either. It's not a real valley. But, anyway.
You are probably experiencing a reaction to what has best been described by Noel Carroll (he's got an umlaut in his first name, but whatever) in A Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart, which he uses the word "liminal" or "interstitial" to describe the appeal of certain types of monsters. Basically, monsters are often created (by the author, not mad scientist) using two anti-thetical states, such as living/dead (anything "undead," natch), animal/human (anything furry, natch) and even solid/liquid (think The Blob).
Anyway, Carroll explains that these kinds of paradoxical monsters often create a paradoxical reaction in the viewer; one of horror (defined by Carroll as a mixture of both fear and disgust) and, at the same time, fascination. He uses this to explain the "paradox of horror," i.e. how people can enjoy fear and disgust. Basically, he says, they don't; they enjoy the "fascination" of monsters. It's a bit weak, in my opinion, as a answer to the paradox of horror, but the theory of "liminality" as a source of both negative and positive reactions works well enough on its own.
Furries are obviously fascinated by a certain type of "liminal monster" (using the definition of monster as "unnatural" rather than "evil"); certain people also have an almost virulent reaction to furry art. Given Carroll's theory, it can be seen that both reactions are entirely natural and even complementary.
The characters in Alpha and Omega exhibit a high level of liminality, but in a way you are unused to (human traits overlaying an animal template, opposite of the usual furry method of animal overlaying a human template); this is why you find them creepy.
SO STOP SAYING UNCANNY VALLEY LIKE YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS, 'CAUSE YOU DON'T.
Unless you were creeped out by the few human characters. That was probably the Uncanny Valley, then.
Creepy designs are creepy.
Why argue?
Because I am a died in the wool horror fan, almost as much as I am a furry fan. There is creepy, and then there is creepy.
To quote Stephen King (from memory):
"On one level, David Cronenberg's Shivers asks how we feel about newfound levels of sexual promiscuity and their consequences in modern society. On another level, it asks how we feel about a leech jumping out of a mailslot and attaching to our face. These are not the same areas of unease at all."
To some extent I think you're splitting hairs. When you're talking about empathy with anthropomorphic characters, the issue is how closely they fit our image of "human".
On the other hand, the Uncanny Valley* is specific about relation to *realistic* depictions, so you're right in that sense.
On the other other hand, language changes! :)
By the way, I wrote an article on this subject for the Association for Computing Machinery -- see http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MCG.2008.79 . I can send it to you privately: Contact me at howling -at- tgeller dot etcetera.
* Capitalized by tradition, really. It's actually a translation of a Japanese phrase used by Masahiro Mori in his seminal 1970 paper on the subject. It should properly be in quotes, but that's unwieldy. Eh, you're probably right... it could be lower-cased at this point.
Perhaps it is capitalized because it has become a real place over time. ;-)
Located near Eerie Indiana ;)
I don't think it is specific to humans, as many animals, especially the Canidae family are familiar enough to humans to be able to identify with on some level and to have traits distinguishable between some kinds of healthy vs. abnormal. The uncanny valley can just be when increased realism in general triggers various negative reactions to subtle issues. Although abstraction and stylisation can subdue or defuse those triggers, and the use of animals would probably act like some amount of additional abstraction compared to similarly styled humans.
It is kind of hard to be so definite about the uncanny valley thing though, since the vast majority of all the stuff written on it is really just conjecture and speculation to explain some people's personal experience. Up until recently, there was little to no actual attempts to research and test some of the ideas related to it. If I remember correctly, recently there was something that suggested the motion and animation was one of the cues people could be quite sensitive to, and it would seem quite possible that even a stylised animated wolf could trigger that for some people if the motions were exaggerated and cartoonish. I haven't seen the film myself to directly comment on that.
Basically, you start with an animal, and slowly star adding human features to it.
You do NOT do it the opposite way. The wolves in this here movie had faces too human and thus a bit creepy.
I like how you left out the often mentioned critic for those who actually know about dog breeding.
Around the section where they're first going to go "howl at the moon" a couple of female pack members are talking and you can hear one say, "It totally relaxes the knot." Then there's the whole concept of, "howling at the moon."
When I first seen the previews, I thought the movie to be of a children's movie, I was mistaken.
Your comment made my day.
I didn't remember that line. Even if I did though I wasn't going to go after factual inaccuracies. It was a movie, a fantasy. If you want it to be accurate then you'll have to watch a documentary.
It still seems like a children's movie to me...
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
~Evelyn Beatrice Hall~
It's actually perfectly logical that "Alpha and Omega" should look like a Disney rip off. It was produced by Richard Rich, who directed "The Fox and the Hound" and "The Black Cauldron" for Disney in the 1980s (classics only if you believe Disney's publicity that every Disney animated feature is a classic), and directed "The Swan Princess", the most obvious Disney imitation of all, for his own Rich Animation Studios in the 1990s.
Why did he do this...
I mean,... you can this concept and make a decent movie out of it.
But he didn't.
As far as I remember The Swan Princess was good. Of course it then had a whole trail of sequels which is never good for something. Unless a sequel is planned from the start it's unlikely to be any good.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
~Evelyn Beatrice Hall~
I think about halfway through I realized, much to my chagrin, I was liking it.
It was about the part when emo-doo wolf volunteered to give rejected suitor a tour. I knew exactly where that subplot was going, but that probably explains why I liked it. It's sappy Disney crap, but it works. Doesn't make it good; in fact, makes it worse.
Bra scene also tickled me, though this time it was the only Dreamworks "edgy with a capital E for Everyone rating" joke that worked, rather than "overused Disney magic moment" that worked.
Those cliches work on me, man.
Probably top ten favorite bad movies.
The movie was okay, I guess. I wasent particularily moved by the storyline but a friend of mine who is all mister tough guy, always serious never cries, actualy cried during the final scenes. did anybody else find the end emothional?
Personal I prefer Balto to Alpha and omega.
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