The company who made this movie specializes in stop-motion clay animation.
However, they chose to make this movie in full CGI for many reasons, one of
them being that water is so hard to make look right with stop-motion.

  Ok, that's fine. What I don't understand is why they tried to imitate
the deficiencies of clay animation in this movie.

  When a movie is a true stop-motion clay animation, it has some technical
deficiencies such as dropped frames, unrealistic objects, etc. This is just
fine with clay animation. It doesn't really bother that much.

  However, CGI doesn't have the same limitations as stop-motion clay
animation, and artificially introducing some (but not all) of the same
limitations is quite bothering. For example jerky mouth movements was
really annoying in an otherwise smooth animation. It just didn't belong
there. It looked bad.
  In a true clay animation it wouldn't have been a problem because
*everything* has the same style, but here it was bothering.

  Also the models were partially modelled after clay figures, but only
partially, and it felt more artificial than anything else.

  IMO if you are going to make a stop-motion clay animation, make a
stop-motion clay animation, and if you are going to make a CGI movie,
then make a CGI movie. Making an artificial hybrid doesn't work,
especially if you are going to use just *some* of the deficiencies
of clay animation but not all of them.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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