On September 4th, the trailer for A Minecraft Movie. The cast of the movie includes many big names, such as: Jason Mamoa, Jack Black, Emma Myers, and Jennifer Coolidge, along with many others. Aaindri Thakuri, writer for Soap Central, explains the plot of the movie as four misfits struggling with their daily life, then getting suddenly sucked into the Overworld, another universe which is all about imagination that has blocklike creatures and is similar to the hit videogame, Minecraft. They find and join Steve, who helps them fight of Zombies and Piglins, and go on an adventure to forces them to be brave and re-find their unique creativity.
Fans, after watching the trailer, were not amused by it.
According to Adam Bentz, writer for Screen Rant, “The first thing that many fans have noticed about the Minecraft Movie trailer is its awkward animation style. ” The Animation style has been compared by people such as tommyinnit to the first version of the Sonic Movie in its uncanny, hyper realistic style. The actors are depicted in live action, while the backgrounds are flats, textured filed backgrounds, with oddly textured mobs from the game.
This is especially disappointing considering that the production designer for the Minecraft movie is Grant Major, the New Zealand-based film legend who won an Oscar for The Lord of the Rings.
Some have gone as far to say that the movie looks near or worse to the 2012 viral “Minecraft in Real Life” videos. Though Jack Black is supposed to play the character of Steve, who has a semi-canon personality, his acting doesn’t at all align. He is Jack Black, playing Jack Black. Him and Jason Samoa being in the game has led fans to joke that most of the budget of the movie went to getting both of them in the movie. The Movie got 1.2 million dislikes on YouTube on the same day that it released, and only 588 thousand likes.
Some fans of the Minecraft franchise were so outraged by the trailer, they resorted to making their own versions of it to improve it. According to Jeremy Dick, writer of CBR, “@Alumio_ on X subsequently shared a video of the whole trailer recreated with animated Minecraft imagery. In less than one day’s time, the video was watched more than 1.6 million times and has 70K likes.” On the video, there are comments such as that of @sophie_wolfie’s which reads “I just want to appreciate….how you fixed the background to be like the Minecraft everyone knows, not the texture pack on steroids that they used (if they even based it off a texture pack instead of just taking real world places and making them look blockier -_-)”. The video takes the design of the official trailer and makes it truer to the look of Minecraft. The fan made animated trailer according, to a comment by @kakuja3911, made is so “the Steve reveal was actually fun to see this way, his skin not having an animated face because he’s in-game…”
So far, there’s been no word as to whether the trailer or movie will be altered in any way. With the movie not coming out till April 5th, it is the hope of fans that, even if the whole thing isn’t altered, the CGI is.
