Perspectives

Rating: 9/10 (21 June 2006)

This ran a big risk of going horribly wrong, but Brad Bird shows in his first feature that he knows how craft a new whole out of genre parts, while keeping his eye on the big picture. The opposite of this movie would be the execrable "Independence Day", where the whole decidedly was a good deal less than the sum of the pieces.
Part of his crafting solution is to take a story set in the past, that's about the past, and keeping the feel of the visual and vocal expression in the past -- no referential pop-culture hokum.
Obviously, this is composed from parts of "The Day the Earth Stood Still", "E.T.", "Terminator 2", "Godzilla" and countless 50's B movies. What matters is that this is smarter than all those put together. The way this shatters old perspectives is placed directly in the visual narrative -- the part where the kid watches the brainlessly stupid movie about the man-eating brain -- all intended to point out the superior intelligence of what we have here.
Secondly, the use of the Giant's exaggerated height gives Bird the advantage of exaggerating the perspective of the 'camera'. He gets to play with focus and composition -- this is superbly detailed from every angle and in every trajectory...Anime without the losses in translation.