Sintel (2010)

Just what I expected

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

This still is the best blender animation studio open movie I've ever seen so far. I was hooked onto it right from the moment Sintel found the baby dragon, took care of it, till the tragic end. Even with blender's basic computer graphics, the story's still emotional enough to grasp anyone's attention.

A ginger girl makes her way through a snow mountain pass when she is suddenly attacked by a stranger. She manages to kill him with her spear, but collapses shortly afterward from exhaustion. We see her wake up in a shack where she tells the old man who found her the story of her special connection to a dragon baby she found with an injured wing and managed to heal it. However, when she was about to release it into freedom, it got caught by a fully-grown dragon and abducted. Since then, she was on the lookout traveling places everywhere to find and free her little dragon.This flashback is finished around the seven-minute mark, when half of the film is over. Sintel recovers in the stranger's shack and moves on with her destination shortly afterward. Finally, she enters a cave where she finds the large and the small dragon. But things are not what they appear to be. I quite enjoyed this short film. The animation is very video game-like and the highlight of the film. The story is sweet and sad at the same time. My favorite scene was when she found the baby dragon for the first time and how she got it to trust her until they finally built a strong bond. I'd love to see Lodewijk and Levy reunite one day for a full feature, maybe even starring Sintel. Very much recommended. One of the best animated short films of the 21st century.

***THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS*** Though the film is technically brilliant, particularly considering it was made entirely with free software, the ending simply did not work for me, emotionally. The ending is so senselessly, needlessly tragic, that it reduces the main character's entire life to a complete waste of time. More, the final few moments reveals this literally has been her entire life. She sees her reflection, and realizes she is no longer the teenage street-kid who went out on the quest. She is visibly aged with gray hair, scarred, gaunt and utterly beaten. This is exactly why the tragedy happens. The story doesn't cover a few months. She spent her entire life on this quest. And, because she spent her entire life on this quest, because she was a true hero and didn't quit, she failed. To me, they were aiming for pathos, missed, and just ended up with pathetic.This is not to say that you can't write a story where the hero fails or dies. Many good stories have been written with downer endings. Romeo and Juliet has a totally downer ending - both the hero and the heroine die. But, there was a REASON they died. The original moral of the story is that vendettas are stupid, hateful and wrong, and lead only to tragedy. Their deaths serve that purpose. More, the story was one that was very well known in Shakespeare's day before anyone even went to the theater, and before the show begins, the chorus basically warns us these are "star-crossed lovers" - I.E. it's going to end badly for them, the fates are against them. Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" also has a downer ending. But there's a reason for it, too. The entire point of the novel is to show that a society that focuses only on self-gratification and relies on the government to insure their happiness can only lead to the destruction of the individual and mindless subservience to the state. Hemmingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is another one that ends tragically. But, there's a reason for that, too. When Francis dies, we are left with the question of whether it was murder or accident, and the overall story forms a statement on a particular economic caste of American culture as it existed at that time, quietly asking important questions about what it is to be a man.In short, death and failure does not mean the story sucks if that death and failure serves the overall moral, theme or general point of the story.However, with "Sintel", the only moral we can gain out of this story is "Don't be loyal, don't try to rescue friends, and don't try to succeed. You'll only spend your entire life trying, get right to the end, then fail spectacularly and have wasted your entire life."

Sintel is an impressive animated film for being built on an open source engine with a crew of less than 100 people. You won't find the same graphical detail seen in mainstream animated movies but you will experience emotion for these characters. Emotion for characters is a hard thing to achieve when dealing in animation. It takes perfect execution of story and animated facial expressions, something which I give the team at Blender Foundation a standing ovation. The story on the other hand seems to be condensed, leaving some questions unanswered.The following section below is a spoiler and is meant for people who have seen the film.**Spoiler Warning** As I said above, the story left some questions unanswered which could of been solved with character development in additional scenes. In the beginning, Sentil is attacked by some random guy. Who is this antagonist and why is he motivated to kill her? Perhaps he was a dragon hunter who wounded Scales in the beginning and spends the rest of the story trying to reclaim the baby dragon as a prize? Or how about Sentil's background, why is she alone and rely on the emotional support of a dragon? These questions could be answered through some story expansion. Other than that, the movie's 15 minute runtime is worth sitting through, although I hope you like bittersweet endings.