“Their stories are illustrated by battlefield, trench and hospital ship scenes whose 2D animation, with its craggy, vaguely cubist shapes and jerky movement, has an interestingly distancing effect, making the battlefield experiences paradoxically more absorbing than live action.
The sheer polish of the CGI-assisted mayhem in big-budget Hollywood films can preclude a visceral response, since the hyper-realistic action is so patently created. Here, animation allows us a detachment that encourages reflection: how dreadful, we ask ourselves as we watch an animated depiction, must the real thing have been?” 4 Stars
Read full review: New Zealand Herald
“Where the film triumphs is in bringing the audience, shoulder to shoulder, alongside the people whose words we hear.”
from Review International Screen Daily
“One that particularly that stood out to me was when a soldier briefly makes friends with an enemy during a truce to bury the dead, before seeing the same man again during battle and facing the conundrum of whether to shoot him or not.
But most of the film is startlingly original, and for that the filmmakers are to be commended. 4.5 Stars”
Read full review at Interview News Hub New Zealand
In one memorable episode, a soldier relates how the opposing forces agreed to a temporary truce so they could bury hundreds of bodies scattered about the no man’s land, and then were back shooting at each other a few days later.
Such anecdotes are what make 25 April more memorable than your average History Channel feature, and the research conducted by Pooley and her team pays off in, even if the network narrative makes it harder to get engrossed in any single story. On the animation side, Flux creates a world that’s both realistic and highly stylized…”