In Review: RPG Metanoia

The Gist

The Filipino's first attempt in making a full-length computer animated film, RPG: Metanoia has more to boast than its CGI claim to fame. Plush with a charming story and characters you can relate, RPG only suffers from its dubbing, which is oftentimes uncomfortable but forgivable anyways.

The Good

• characters are fleshed out properly and are very relatable
• charming story that makes for a good family movie

The Bad

• jittery, seemingly less than 24 fps animation on the "game world," hurts my eyes
• the voice acting needs a little work, while I do appreciate most of the voice actors, the lead character's voice is a bit too high pitched and might not work comfort on everyone's ears

Synopsis

Nico (voiced by Zaijan Jaranilla) is a 5th grader addicted to playing Metanoia, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. He prides himself to have the strongest game character in his peer group, but outside online games, he is actually inept. So when they lost the global tournament of Metanoia and were banned from playing at their local internet cafe, Nico needed to learn how to live life beyond the pc monitor. During their absence, however, tragedy strikes in Metanoia and only Nico and his peers can help put things back together.

First-Born

Some facts: RPG Metanoia took 4 years to make and the partnership between AmbientMedia and ABS-CBN only partnered last 2009. The reason perhaps for the long production time is not technology but funding. Or it could be both. When it was released during the previous film fest, it was marketed as the first 3D full-length computer animated film. People made a big deal out of it, but the true strength of the film is not that it is computer animated, but that it has a story line and script that would make other film fest entries ashamed of competing. In terms of animation, RPG is behind foreign efforts, but quite understandably so. It is still a step in the right direction for the Philippine cinema industry and if more efforts in the future would be improvements of this, then that is a very welcome development.

Sound Check

RPG begins with a scene in the game world. I wish they have done otherwise. To differentiate the game world from the real world, AmbientMedia decided to make the game world animation jittery--not so fluid animation, like watching a movie that has plenty of skipped frames. The characters in the game world and real world look alike for the audience to easily identify them and still differentiate the two worlds. But how I wish they didn't. It looks unpolished and turns you off at once.

Outside the decision to use the jittery animation effect on the game world, the animation is fine and very fluid. Had this been dubbed in English, you would think it was made outside the Philippines. This is a good attempt for starters and I hope this continues and improves.

The voice acting and dubbing were fine, save for Nico's voice. Zaijan Jaranilla's voice really does not rub well on me. Perhaps because it is too high-pitched and seemingly too childish for his age. The other kids were apparently voiced by children, too, and I didn't mind them much--to be honest they were really good that you'd think they were voiced by professional dubbers. But the main character kind of didn't work for me. Though it's all personal preference there.

I wish I could have enjoyed the movie as much as I have wanted to, but truth is I did not. Perhaps I was looking where that charm is, but I couldn't find it, or I did but it wasn't enough, or I just had too many expectations due to the number of praises it got.

Truth is, I can enjoy Filipino movies, but this one, while technically is a cause for celebration, I can't help but feel it's nothing more than mediocre. But that's good enough already to celebrate. We have made our first step to modernization. We can make movies like this now and I hope it will only get better in the future. For my verdict:

A passing mark of 3/5.