On a bit of a whim, I chose Kaena from the DVD rental store, and I certainly don't regret it. The plot is a bit derivative, with insufficient background information to build a context to understand the movie. But one can't fault the imagery or the sound.

Kaena is a computer-generated animation out of France, bringing a European gravitas and visual sophistication to an animation style inspired by Japanese and American (in that order) animation.

The world, while dominated by the browns of the tree that is the world Kaena lives on, is colourful and rendered in a pseudo-realistic manner that Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within brought to the masses, but improved for the setting.

The music is great, engaging yet subtle. It's not tuned to the action - something I often find irritating in adventure films lately.

It seems that it's not a unanimous, but I thought the English voice-actors were great. Kirsten Dunst (pre-Spiderman) voices Kaena, and I thought she brought something engaging to the heroine. Technically, the voices were well-synchronised to the characters' movements, keeping the pseudo-realism going.

According to Kaena director/instigator Chris Delaporte, while they wanted to do a movie, Kaena was first expressed in a game, which I think comes through in the movie - in at least the way the characters move and navigate their world and the pacing.

Jeremy suggests the plot is derivative - yet another defiantly-correct young person saves the world from unknown evil baddies. And without a deeper world (background information, context), it is something that comes through.

However, one interesting thing in the movie is that the baddies are the original inhabitants, and have an animal's place in the moral perspective - they're simply natural forces rather than evil itself. I think that could've been better conveyed, as it seems the queen of the baddies is more evil due to her obsession. But would a queen ant do something similar, perhaps? I don't know.

There are too many places where there's wonderful computer-generated animation sequences that seem to want to convey information to us, but which are impossible to gather anything from. The entire opening sequence seemed to me to be a battle of sorts, with powerful weapons falling into the sap. I initially figured this was how the Vecanoi arrived, but it seems after reading other sources on the world that it has more to do with the Selenites' origin.

But despite it's shortcomings, I really recommend this movie to experience the style and picturesque pseudo-realistic backdrops. And the world can do with more no-nonsense young heroines who can take care of themselves.