BUDU

I love this atmosphere! The full moon, dark silhouettes, strange rituals... The puppets look creepy. Those huge, slightly crazy eyes on the guy in the hood give me the chills. The story about the Budu curse sounds like a great setup for a horror game.

It's a very cohesive world. The color palette: cold blue, grey, and black perfectly conveys a sense of hopelessness. The design of the sorcerer's costume with those intricate patterns and the headpiece deserves a separate award. This is a high level of art direction.

I always admire when creators choose stop-motion for such dark stories. The stone textures in the ruined city look incredibly tactile. The work with lighting and mist is especially impressive. It's very hard to do manually. You can tell the sets, especially that castle and the ship, were created with immense attention to detail.

This film is a metaphor for our lives. The director asks the main question: are we the captains of our ship or just passengers swept away by the waves? The image of the man sailing into the mist toward the unknown perfectly illustrates the human condition of abandonment.

I like that the film doesn't give readymade answers. The director explicitly says the goal isn't to present a narrative, but to ask a question. We have to decide for ourselves what these symbols mean. Is the ship fate? Is the mist our ignorance of the future? This cinema is for meditation, not entertainment.