The animated Heart String Marionette allows us to see what would happen if the Wallace and Gromit filmmakers remade Metropolis as Noh theater. Highly stylized, with the animated characters are often masked as in Noh, Heart String Marionette is an epic that addresses themes of independence and authority. Auteur M Dot Strange effectively uses color, with much of the film in cold blue hues that evoke a brooding menace; splashes of red bring up the action scenes. The music by Endika is essential to the film.
Watch the trailer and ask yourself if you would enjoy this for another 119 minutes. I didn’t, but I’m not the audience for this film.