Ainbo: Spirit of the Amazon

The animation and color composition in the film are visually appealing and smooth, enhancing the sense of realism. However, despite an interesting story idea, the execution falls flat, with weak character development, shallow adventure, and lackluster voice acting that fails to evoke emotion. Inconsistencies in scenes and underwhelming sound design make it hard to fully engage, though the film remains moderately watchable. Read the full review here: (Indonesian version : alunauwie.com)

Ainbo is a visually really nice movie with lovely depictions of nature and really nice animations. Sadly, writing and pacing are, how to say? "All over the place?" I have to agree with other reviews that say it's a mix of several Disney movies without hitting the spirit of any of them. The main story feels like a mix of Moana and Pocahontas: A young girl needs to safe her village from a dark curse that kills humans and fishes alike, assisted by her animal spirit guardians. The spirit guardians are two friendly animals that ewoke some feelings of Lion King's Timon and Pumbaa. Sadly, as nice as they are, their jokes mostly fall flat and even conversations with them run in aimless circles. Other human characters have strangely unstable personalities switching between belowed best friend and pissed off ruler as well as dangerous, cold-hearted warrior to gentle father-figure in the length of just one scene. Then the movie tries to scratch at the environmental theme of capitalism destroying the Amazon, which would be an important message, but it's quickly given up as the story shifts back to "evil curses" again and new characters are introduced in short scenes where all of their personality is established in a single conversation. This movie had quite some potential with beautiful environments and several mythical creatures. Sadly all such scenes were short and lacked emotion and most human characters failed to make one feel luch for them at all. I have the feeling the movie didn't really know what direction it should go into, and thus it was decided to just go into all of them. It's a pity, because I think simply concentrating on the "capitalism" antagonist could've made for a nice environmentalism story, even if that would've meant pushing the movie more into a Pocahontas or Avatar direction. So, yeah, it's not really bad, but certainly lacks heart and emotion. Sadly, because we should learn more about saving the Amazon and indigenous people. Still, visually it's a nice piece, at least.