Glimmerubro It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

thempettys After reading through a mess of mostly negative reviews, I thought I'd add my two cents. My family and I, LOVE "The Snurks"! We've probably seen it 15 times or more. Who really cares about nitpicking on all the technical junk or whining about unrealistic sociological differences. It's not supposed to be real, it's an animated film!! If you sit through the movie with your kids and watch it for it's entertainment value, you will NOT be disappointed. The Snurks is a fun action packed beautiful film with plenty of humor and suspense. Perhaps the mere fact that this movie is not loaded with the sly adult humor that most films (animated included) sadly think they need to have, is the reason for the negative comments. I don't know. I DO know, however that this movie is worth watching again and again!!

God-12 This is a children's cartoon film, but a very peculiar one. Like another recent film it features a female, English-speaking girl with a nice bum - all the other characters are yanks. It also, very strangely, considers, in some detail, the differences between reality and fiction as well as the matter of free will. It also makes reference to Descartes 'Cogito ergo sum'. I'm not really sure what these are doing in a children's film. Maybe, like the excellent 'Sophie's World' they really are trying to introduce philosophy to very young children. If they are, then there are some peculiar ways of going about it. The villain has a plan to incinerate all plebvision viewers, particularly those with inclinations to watch a particular cartoon, by diverting a stream of volcanic lava through their plebvision sets. A brilliant scheme and a possible object lesson for the children. Sadly, though, the villain is thwarted and plebvision remains. Actually, plebvision is a constant theme throughout the film, which isn't very nice. Technically the film is superb compared to the old days, but poor compared to something like Shrek - the character's lips don't fit the voices that well, for one thing, and the three eye'd frog is not very convincing. The other odd thing about the film, that I meant to mention, is the name. The place is called 'gaya', but they all pronounce it 'guya'. If they wanted it to rhyme with Gaia, the goddess, then why on earth didn't they just call it 'guya'? Is it that they didn't want to say 'gaya' properly because of the homosexual meaning of 'gay'? If so, that would be even odder, because the place seemed quite a gay place, in the standard meaning of the world and it would be good to introduce children to the happy and fun meaning of the word.

hobold The movie does have significant weaknesses, as the other comments point out, but there are a few strengths worthy of note.I was positively impressed by the global level of detail of scene backgrounds. Where in other CGI movies you get to see, say, a row of buildings with carefully modelled details near the camera, then a lot of empty space behind those, and finally a matte painting of the 'horizon', Back to Gaya shows you whole blocks of buildings, with the next streets showing through the gaps, all in credibly full detail, but without any obvious repetition of similar structures. To me these shots had a sense of realism that I had not seen before in CGI movies.Along the same vein, when there are open air views, the distant landscape is never a simple background painting, but a detailed model. As far as I can tell, even the clouds in the sky were actual 3D entities instead of the usual flat background painting. This gives the camera a lot more freedom to move large distances and freely look around the scenery. The filmmakers probably overused this freedom somewhat, though, making some scenes hard to follow.The outstanding level of detail extends to things like vegetation interacting with buildings, like plants growing inbetween and around fenceposts, for example. What I also liked was the general worn and aged look of things, a refreshing change from the polished featureless surfaces that are all too common on CGI movies' background objects.The character animation in comparison is two classes below that, as the other comments mention. One thing I like about the characters, though, is the courage of the designers to go for the outright bizarre with the 'human' roles. It was interesting to see character design exploring a different direction than the usual either hyperrealistic or more classical comic style.So, despite its weaknesses, Back to Gaya actually manages to advance the state of the CGI art on a few fronts. I do hope that it will be commercially successful enough that the makers get another chance to apply their talents to a better story.

GerZah I've heard the producers say: "Hey, we don't want to be 'like Pixar' or like anything else ... !"OK. But in 2004 you have to reach certain technical standards. And the makers of "Gaya" didn't. The kinematics is wooden, the camera movements make you dizzy and the lip-sync is disastrous. I mean -- this is a German CGI movie, so why are the German voices out of sync? Even movies like "Shrek" or "Ice Age" have been dubbed with German voices without visible glitches like that.Aside from the technique: It's a nice animation film, but the plot is a bit thin and the characters are a bit weak. "Back to Gaya" is OK, but it's not more than that.