The Guardian Brothers (2015)

Masterful Cinema

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The story of two spirit brothers was a different take on many different Chinese cultural animations out there. However, the story wasn't well delivered. In the English dub we have a young girl named Rain, voiced by Bella Thorne who sounds suspiciously older than the girl's mother, voiced by Nicole Kidman. The spirit world doesn't have a logical sense to it. Some minor characters, like Blossom, seem to have little to no significant influence on the story at all. This story has little to no depth and has all the heart of a child's picture book. The most interesting part to me was the Chinese traditions that are so different from my own and I could have gotten that much information from a Google search.

An animated gem which is a pleasure to watch. Expect great visuals, a cool story and family-friendly fun with lots of soul. Looking forward to the next installment by the creators. I highly recommend this movie!

Love the story. I did not realize it was a dub as it was done well. Whole family likes this.

I wish I had the chance of seeing "Little Door Gods" before making this review. Unfortunately, I only had the chance of watching "The Guardian Brothers", the English dubbed version that was released in the United States, so I won't able to make a proper comparison between them. With that being said, it still seems pretty obvious something went lost on translation.Without being terrible as the 4Kids anime dubs (or the atrocious Saban adaptation of the 3 Digimon films) "The Guardian Brothers" has its share of problems. The first of all (and the most notorious) it's the excessive (and many times inadequate) use of songs, which in many occasions completely kill the mood of several scenes. Most of them feel randomly chosen and honestly, they were a poor attempt to add humor to a story which already had plenty of that.The second problem is the intrusive narration, which at moments reminded me of "The Tale of Despereaux", pointing out the obvious in a couple of scenes. Ironically enough, certain parts of the movie felt a bit confusing or not properly explained, yet the narration was completely absent during those moments.On the other side, the voice acting was a mixed bag: Most of the voices did an adequate job for each character, even if the script wasn't exactly stellar. Dub problems aside, "The Guardian Brothers" was still a watchable family flick, with a neat animation style and some charming moments, but I wish the story fully explored the potential of its premise, and this dub could have a done a better job adapting the original version of this film for English speaking audiences.