Animal World (Dongwu shijie) [Sub: Eng]

Drawing equally from the altered-reality universes of comic books and video games, Animal World is an exciting if disjointed mash of ideas and emotions.

It's not perfect, but big bold swings like this never are - I'd take a messy, but genuinely innovative feature like this any day over the parade of generic blockbusters offered up at most matinees.

Animal World is consistently entertaining and a marginal improvement on the histrionics of its Japanese predecessor.

Animal World is dry and repetitive, but it got my gamer brain going.

This makes for a pretty fun little film about an absurd underground competition, and Yan Han invests his narrative with some pretty harsh criticism of those who value personal wealth more than human compassion.

[An] aggressively pointless 140 minutes of misdirection and incoherence.

It's also incredibly uneven, visually overworked and frequently substitutes noisy kinetic action for actual narrative momentum.

It's overstuffed, disjointed and suffers from storytelling longueurs but there is so much filmmaking invention and spurts of nutty energy it adds up to a thoroughly enjoyable romp.

What he fails to explain is who director Han Yan and the producers think they were making this movie for, because it's extremely nerdy stuff, however many killer clown fantasy sequences are dropped in.

It's a scenario that is realised in extravagant fashion by writer-director Han Yan, whose heightened sensibility oscillates between dazzling and dizzying, often in the same elaborately designed sequence.