Not very good. I really liked the concept and world building, which would've worked for a video game rather than a movie. But with the execution as is, it falls incredibly flat. The plot goes nowhere, the characters aren't very interesting, nothing exciting really happens, and the climax is disappointingly forced and the ending was flat. The animation looked like that of a PS1 cutscene (for an animation project made on a $25 million budget, I'd expect more). Some of the creature designs were cool looking though the human characters looked pretty hideous. The voice acting is pretty decent. Overall I found this to be a mediocre animated film. 4/10

Clearly a dated CGI animation I can live with that. But the story is a bit all over the place.

Kind of a lifeless, dull anime with an overly convoluted plot.

Science-fiction animation with impressive visuals superimposed on a videogame-grade storyline and many unnecessary, "accidental" sexy poses.

Charming little sci-fi fantasy film about a girl who leads her people to a new world.

One line summary: Relentlessly ugly and poor animation meets nearly opaque script. -------------------------- The picture starts near a village high on a huge vine called Axis. One resident is Kaena, a young adult woman who likes to adventure, while the rest of the village is bound to harvesting sap and offering it to the gods. For sassing the priest, she is exiled. She is captured by an unfamiliar group that is very interested in her because she has curiosity, and will venture beyond the village. Opaz and his people have reconstructed a star ship to return to their home planet. Kaena sees visions of a repository of knowledge of Opaz' people. After various machinations, the repository opens itself to Kaena, with conflict all around her. Will the disputes among the groups be resolved? ------Scores------- Art/Animation: 2/10 There is seriously too much negative space is the artwork for most of the scenes, rather like the more disgusting parts of the Alien series, or most of H. R. Giger's paintings or sculptures. It is mostly dark, dull, depressing, surreal, and hideous. Other parts of the film are overly bright and washed out. Neither of these habits is attractive or 'eye candy' as I have seen this monstrosity described so often. Here and there I see serious frame jumps, the kind one sees in a flip book. Sound: 2/10 Amazingly bad leveling. Keep your hand near the volume control. This detracted seriously from the voice acting. Acting: 4/10 Richard Harris and Keith David were fine; Kirsten Dunst was much better than I expected. The queen and so many others were just terrible. Screenplay: 3/10 Next to opaque. Exposition of motivations was a distant, never achieved goal.

Scenery and color was fantastic. Hard to figure why different races were fighting. I think it was a happy ending. I'm not sure...

A bit weak story, but nevertheless nicely done.

78% Could have been something great.

great anime movie.if you love your anime and movies like avatar come watch this

Very well made and well voiced fantasy film.

Kaena is an incoherent, dull sci-fi flick with visually inventive animation

Six years older but still a better sci-fi movie than Avatar.

The film was disjointed. I really wanted to like it, but it just felt flat.

KAENA isn't bad, but it is just not what is considered "ground-breaking," and there are many who claim it is. It's impressive considering that it was done on a low budget and dreampt up by people who at the beginning of the project had very little knowledge of film-making. KAENA is a great example of how a little resourcefulness can pull the rabbit out of the hat, but overall it certainly is not a revolution in CGI animation. This is why it is not a CGI revolution: -Sometimes they had to cut corners by reducing the frame rate to 12 FPS. Ugh. I would've just cut the shots out altogether. -The character models often did not deform right. For example, if a human model lowered his arm, the skin would fold like clothing. Sometimes this would lead to noticeable distortions in the characters. Maybe they didn't care too much for painting skin weights properly. -The animation was very linear in some places. Objects and characters would basically switch between poses one at a time, a problem especially noticeable when characters are talking. You can almost see the animators pulling the sliders for their blend shapes! Here's an "O", here's an "M"... -Weight and inertia problems. Often people and objects did not move as they should under certain stress conditions. For example, Kaena landing on the floor after a very long jump. Not enough emphasis was put into the animation to make her landing credible. Or, when a huge sap monster stomps around, the camera shakes, but it does not seem as though the monster has as much mass as the screen area he occupies suggests. This happens so often, it's hard to buy into most of the character movements throughout the film. -The texturing was really monotonous. Most of the humans were very smooth-skinned, the wood texture for the roots was used too much (why couldn't they have something grow ON the roots? Or at least do something to give the surfaces more detail...it's almost as if they made a single NURBS surface for the floor in some shots), and sometimes, bump mapping was used very little on surfaces that were immediately noticeable to the viewer. It serves for some really dull and monochrome backgrounds. -Design inconsistency. This is a huge problem. Some humans looked more proportionately accurate than others, for example, Kaena had a somewhat realistic human body design, and others would be drawn more distorted, like cartoons. In addition, the sap monsters have really detailed models and effects, where many human characters were smooth or cartoon-like. The animation was also inconsistent this way-- sometimes Kaena would have more expression in her face than her body, and sometimes it'd be the opposite. It's almost as if, wow, many different artists worked on this film (but, we aren't supposed to know that, right?). -Motion blur. Please, if you aren't going to use deformations, turn up the motion blur. It seems as if the animation is STROBING. It would really help in those low frame rate shots. But... there are some good things about the art of Kaena. The fluid effects were nicely done (although they did not often interact well with other objects), the lighting was well done, in somewhat of a chiaroscuro fashion, and some of the models are convincing; mainly the sap monsters because of their amount of detail. Bravo in these respects. AXIS, a gigantic coiling plant, stretches high above the clouds... At its center is a village whose people are in mortal danger because Axis is withering... it's sap is drying up. The people beg their gods for help... but to no avail. Compelled by a mysterious force, Kaena, a rebellious, high-spirited teenage girl will defy the High Priest and her people's ancestral beliefs to take the perilous journey through the Axis and discover what dark secrets lie beyond the clouds... A dying world, an evil force, a terrible secret...

Cheap animation. And so boring, with no good well known people to play the roles

A fun little animated flick, with a nice mix of fantasy and sci-fi.

The movie is dreadfully boring with terrible animation. There's not much to see here except for some interesting out of place voice work.

didnt like the style of animation but it was an ok story i guess.. good for one watch

poor animation and cliche story meh