{"id":15960,"date":"2015-07-18T16:47:42","date_gmt":"2015-07-18T20:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=15960"},"modified":"2020-07-29T11:07:56","modified_gmt":"2020-07-29T15:07:56","slug":"crimson-whale-2014-fantasia-film-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2015\/07\/18\/crimson-whale-2014-fantasia-film-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"Crimson Whale (2014) [Fantasia Film Festival]"},"content":{"rendered":"

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FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was completely mixed with \u201cCrimson Whale\u201d as a feature, because when you get down to it, it feels like it pads its run time. It\u2019s only seventy minutes in length, and a lot of it feels like its treading water to get to the inevitable confrontation with its titular foe that happens to be anomaly of nature. \u201cCrimson Whale\u201d isn\u2019t the worst anime film I\u2019ve ever seen. It just isn\u2019t all that good. It gets the distinction of being middle of the road mainly because it\u2019s just so damn gloomy and mean spirited. It\u2019s violent, and dark, and definitely does not thrive on supplying a happy ending. It barely has an ending, when you cut to the chase.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 2070, and Korea has become the center of volcanic activity where earthquakes strike almost every day leaving the city in an apocalyptic ruin. Ha-jin is an orphan abandoned by her family who spends her days dealing drugs to degenerates and stealing to survive. She is haunted and driven gradually mad by her memories of slaughtering groups of whales. She has a talent for calling them from the sea, and sent many to be slaughtered for food by desperate villagers. Ha Jin is called on by a group of pirates and eventually taken by them to call the Crimson Whale, a whale that looms at the heart of a volcano. They want to slay it so they can acquire precious Uncentium.<\/p>\n

\u201cCrimson Whale\u201d garners shades of \u201cMoby Dick\u201d with one of the crew members holding a vicious grudge against the crimson whale for biting off her arm. This leaves the crew with their own ulterior motives in confronting the whale, while Ha Jin spends her time moaning about her past, whining to the crew, and trying to figure out if it\u2019s worth killing the whale if it means she can acquire vast amounts of wealth. Some of the crew want to kill the whale, some want to sell it for food, and others simply want to bypass it to get to the Uncentium to make it to a mythical village inexplicably untouched by the earthquakes. The creative work of the Korean Academy of Film Arts\u2019 Advanced Program, \u201cCrimson Whale\u201d is a mixed bag. Sometimes it devotes itself to being for younger audiences, and then it displays immense violence.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the animation is crudely simplistic, and then conveys immense detail, and let\u2019s face it, the voice work needs a lot of redoing, if only because some of the performers come off as wooden. That said, \u201cCrimson Whale\u201d kept me invested in its tale, mainly because Ha Jin is such an interesting anti-heroine. She\u2019s definitely ashamed of her gift for calling whales, and has no choice but to confront the Crimson Whale who seems to be a metaphor for her punishment for seizing and killing all the sea animals. \u201cCrimson Whale\u201d is definitely middling anime, but it achieves a somewhat interesting tale about man vs. nature and man vs. himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL I was completely mixed with \u201cCrimson Whale\u201d as a feature, because when you get down to it, it feels like it pads its run time. It\u2019s only seventy minutes in length, and a lot of it feels like its treading water to get to the inevitable confrontation with its titular foe that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497,1284,12],"tags":[58,71,100,104,170,367,906],"class_list":["post-15960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fantasia-fest","category-festivalsevents","category-movie-reviews","tag-action","tag-adventure","tag-anime","tag-apocalypse","tag-c","tag-foreign","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15960"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15963,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15960\/revisions\/15963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}