This file was generated 2002-06-09 04:23 GMT. This movie's information hasn't changed since 2001-09-03.
With all the effort it takes to produce a 3D film using cell animation, one could hope for good writing to justify the effort. This is not the case with Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. The writing was a strange pastiche of Biblical stories (laying on of hands, curing blindness), Arthurian legend (pulling the sword from the stone), and Star Wars (many of the characters, a sword without a conventional blade).
According to his own site, writer Jeffrey Scott has a lot of television animation credits. The quality of the dialogue reflects that a little too well. I repeatedly wanted to smack the protagonist and tell him to wake up. He uses his bladeless sword to cut through metal, but still insists that he has to "find" the blade.
Intriguing though the concept of 3D cell animation is, there's a big problem with it. The only value add is flat things at different distances. There were a few instances of a single object being shown at a handful of depths, but overwhelmingly, giving flat things a distance from the viewer doesn't help much. There was one instance of an object in the extreme foreground that wasn't placed well, giving viewers the impression that it was somewhere inside their head instead of in front. There was also a laser beam shot between two starships that looked completely wrong.
Unfortunately, the novelty value can't escape from the script. The most entertainment you'll get (assuming that you find a proper, 3D screening to attend in the first place) is from counting the Star Wars ripoffs and mocking the protagonist's idiocy.