One area I never really got around to covering before was motion comics. Motion comics were briefly common with Marvel investing hard in the medium through adaptations of Astonishing X-Men, Black Panther, Inhumans, and Iron Man: Extremis among other works. They’re not all that popular and often derided as ineffective. I’d likely ignore them otherwise but since I’m doing a week of these I figured I should cover one.

Inhumans (2014, 88 minutes)

Plot: Members of a race of immortals struggle to remember their true identities while a growing threat looms.

Source Material: Motion Comics are by definition basically the source material except loosely animated. So if you’ve read the original Neil Gaiman/John Romita Jr. comic, you’re basically rereading it. My thoughts on that? Well I liked it enough to throw this on. It’s good. But is it a movie?

Animation: One reason I chose this was I love, love, love JRJr’s art. I figured no matter what I’d get to look at it for 90 minutes. Good thing I felt that way because this is NOT animation. Oh there’s loose animation to convey movement and speech, but this is agonizingly static. Lots of still shots or just blinking throughout. Some transparent panning and scanning gives the illusion of motion too.

Script: What I’m studying here is less is this a good script and more does just straight using a comic script work? The answer? Yeah, it does. Gaiman has long written with a theatrical bent, being a talented writer for TV and Film, making his work a natural for this format. This is a solidly moving, dense story that held my interest. It ends irritatingly open ended, but that’s the material.

Voice Acting: Really damned good and almost makes you forget how bad the talking scenes are. The actors are all unknowns who remind once more the virtue of talented voices. It works and works well.

Final Verdict: There’s a lot of good here but in the end in no way is this a movie. This just does not work one bit. It’s poorly edited and clumsy. Comics are comics. Movies are movies. This? 0/5. It doesn’t count. Read the book.