A boy's mother is dying from cancer, he is being bullied at school and doesn't want to go live with his grandmother. A giant tree monster that may be real, a dream, imagination or hallucination visits him to tell stories.
Besides the monster, this was sappy, lame and boring. The hour 40 duration seemed much longer because the scenes without the monster moved very slowly. The plots of the monster's short stories were much better than the "real world" plot of the whole film. The characters were actually not that bad. All of the dialogue was well written and the actors played their roles appropriately. My favorite set was the cemetery with the sinkhole from the boy's nightmare. Everything else was pretty mundane. The camera-work was professionally done and the editing was seamless. I can't say that I noticed any really good shots that stood out though. The special effects for the tree monster were what kept me from turning this off. It may be CG, but it was good CG. The animations for the monster's stories were also done quite well. Although CG as well, they had a bold style that I appreciated. The audio was all mixed well, but I think that the monster sounded too much like an Ent from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. I liked that the style was a little on the dark and gloomy side for the whole film. This won 23/50 awards that it was nominated for, made a gain of about 4 million dollars, has a 7.5/10 on IMDB and 86% on Rotten Tomatoes. I think that it got too much credit. I rate it tolerable because the monster and gloominess were the only positive aspects that I could see.
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