Some magic lost in translation

Rating: 6/10 (29 July 2017)

I absolutely love stop motion animation so I feel almost guilty not loving this movie. The book is wonderful and they do nail a few scenes but mostly it felt like it was trying to copy the book exactly instead of making it its own. The voice acting is great and in theory I didn't have an issue with the addition of the neighbour kid. He never seemed to quite mesh with the story and I don't know that it even needed him in order to smooth out the story with exposition.
So much time and effort went into this but I was not really floored by the visuals or the story execution. As much as I love stop motion, it has so much time required to make it and then you have to make it a good movie too. This one falls into the same category as Anomalisa in that it is visually impressive but falls flat as a complete story.