Great cast, great story, great dialogue. Awfully distracting animation.

Rating: 7/10 (24 February 2019)

The problem I found with it was the mixing of several animation styles. The faces of the characters were in 3D and had a lot of depth to them, but the shadows of their faces and their expressions were in 2D and had no depth, and looked like a transparent plastic screen with lines put on top of a TV screen. Which added a very strong, very annoying uncanny valley effect to their faces.
Then the low FPS in some scenes made it seem like stop animation. And lastly, the halftone comic-like effect was too distracting and looked like camera noise in some scenes, specially the shadows.
Now, I'm not opposed to different or experimental animation styles by any means. I have loved films like The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Le Tableau, La Tortue Rouge, Lucky and Zorba... which are all a bit out there in terms of animation.
But that's the thing, they combine a couple of things and come up with a new nicer thing. But in this film, they combined so many new things that it's just hard to focus on anything when at every frame you have so many new distracting elements.
At the end, I did end up not noticing the animation so much, because at that point I was really into the story. But at first, it was an absolute tour-de-force getting through the mismatched popourri of styles.
And, again, Disney/Pixar style is not the only style I'm familiar with.
I think if they dialed it back it would have been much nicer. Had they done the faces normal (by normal I mean of one style and stick to it, instead of mixing two very different styles that don't work well together) and a consistent cinema standard FPS. I could have dealt with the rest.
I still give it a 7. But it's in spite of the animation. Not because of it.