First Squad. A Russian movie with Japanese animation, featuring zombies during World War II. I usually like Russian attitude and ways of thinking, and Japanese are usually unmatched when it comes to 2D animation. This should be good.
Tuesday, 13 PM, small theater. I figured not many people would come for this one. It turns out that I ended up meeting 5 different people I knew there. On the other hand, they thought it would be sold out. None of us were right, the theater was almost full.
So the movie starts, we see Nadya, a kid doing some sort of divination tricks with army soldiers. Suddenly they get attacked, we see German (or maybe Russians, depending on where she was at that moment) dropping bombs on the army. Chaos and panic. People try to survive, and then...
OMFG. What is that?
The movie now features a real life human historian, on a black background, filling us in on the situation during this part of the war between Russians and Germans. Okay... this was surprising. I am not saying it is bad, at first I simply thought it would only be an animated movie.
The movie goes on, constantly switching between the main animated story, and testimonies from historians or war veterans. Nadya eventually gets back to her headquarters as an elite kid soldier. From there on, she tries to bring back her former squad partners from the dead in order to fight dead knights the German army are planning to bring to war. By the end of the movie, she succeeds in her task, and the evil dead knight seems vanquished.
During human interviews, we learn how both Russia and Germany tries to research ways to revive the dead as soldiers during the war. As this seems quite possible, it also seems as though they are trying to tell us that what we are seeing in the movie, with zombies and everything, is actually what really happened during WWII.
All this knowledge about what happened during the war was actually interesting. However, by the end of the movie, it acted more as a mood-killer than as a way to help us understand what was happening. I have the feeling that it would have been best to feature all those interviews as bonus feature on a DVD. That way, it would have been possible to view this, without breaking the general flow of the story.
Now let us go back to the real story, as in what is happened to Nadya and her friends. If we forget about the real humans, First Squad is actually a good movie. The animation was good, the plot was good, and it was refreshing to see a retelling of WWII that was completely different from what we are used to see. No god sent American soldiers that came to save the day. This time, it's about Russia struggling to get their elite kid to defeat a horde of evil undead soldiers.
Apart from the interviews, the movie still had its share of down sides. Overall, the movie was actually quite short. If we take out the interviews, I think the movie would be less than an hour. This feels more like an episode than a movie. If we consider the fact that at the end, the war does not seem to be over, maybe we will get more episodes of this.
Another consequence of the movie being too short was something I perceived as a lack of challenge. At first she's lost. Then she finds her way home. She gets a new missions. She goes to get her friends from the dead. They fight. They win. At no point in the movie Nadya ends up facing serious difficulties, she never really needs to come up with new solutions. I think this is something that could have been better, and more challenge would have given us a more lengthy movie.
If we pack all this together, First Squad was actually a movie I enjoyed seeing. The characters were cool, the animation was good. The setting felt like something new and refreshing, even thought it was World War II. The interviews disrupted the general flow of the story, but they still brought us some information, and helped to understand what was happening in relation to the real WWII.
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