Why is it animated?

Rating: 4/10 (8 December 2018)

Beowulf is like the biggest question mark to me, purely as watched the movie and looked back on it the one question that was constantly on my mind was simply "Why is it animated?" I can understand why the Polar Express is animated even though yes you could've just made it in live-action and not much would be different, I can understand Christmas Carol being animated, but I for the life of me cannot comprehend what was the thought process behind the decision to make Beowulf animated. There was no real reason to have the movie be animated and nothing about it screamed for it to be animated, the movie could've simply have been made in live-action and nothing would be different, aside from Ray Winstone as Beowulf but that could be fixed through casting, I've often joked about how the possible reason for the movie being animated was that Zemeckis was too damn lazy to afford actually sets, props, costumes, make-up and extras that he was just like, "You know, let's just do it all in animation and have our few main stars play multiple roles and be done for the day, I mean, honestly who cares anymore?" I just couldn't get invested with the story, characters and action because I was just too damn distracted, baffled and unnerved by the animation of everything. The animation is right there in the uncanny valley, having a lot of character designs meant to look almost exactly like the actors playing the characters, with the exception of turning Ray Winstone into a beefed up action hero and Crispin Glover into a monster, which returns to my main question "Why is it animated?" If you're going through the trouble of trying to make a lot of characters look just like their actors and have them perform mo-cap to portray said characters, why couldn't they have just made the movie in live-action instead of hassling with animation? So yeah, I didn't like the movie, the only thing I did like about it was Alan Silvestri's score, but even then it didn't really do much to enhance my viewership of the movie, it made me listen to the music on its own and imagine a movie I would've liked to see along with music.