King of Thorn is one of the rare movies that manages to pace itself very well, neither boring the audience or giving them too much of adrenaline rush. It's a film that unravels it's mysteries bit by bit without giving it all away.
Story: This is an unabashed survival horror title, it's got the genre's tropes down to a fine art, a facility over-run with thorns and weird creatures that attack survivors. But what's really great about the story of this movie is that they keep unraveling mysteries as time goes on, the revealing of these mysteries are done perfectly and they mix these well with the action sequences so that your not sitting around listening to someone explain everything and boring you to death. The only real problem with the story is that near the end it becomes incredibly confusing and you have no idea what is real and what is not.
Art: I want to make it clear the reason this gets a low grade is not because of the absolutely beautiful 2D animation and backgrounds, it gets it because of some really really shitty 3D Animation, There is no reason to have the human beings become 3D out of nowhere and then suddenly shift to 2D, it looks jarring and out of place. This is what really brings down the movie in my opinion, if they kept it to completely 2D, this would probably be a near masterpiece, instead it really harms the movie.
Sound: I watched this on English Dub, there are accents for all the characters except for Kasumi, Shizuka, Peter and Ron. The accents are perfect and are not out of place or take away from the story. Though at times I felt R Bruce Elliott's Italian accent slipped a little into Russian, however that's not as much of a big concern if you've watched the movie. The music on the other hand for this title is incredible, anytime a title makes you want to look up who did the scoring for it, you know you have good music. Toshihiko Sahashi did an incredible job with this soundtrack and payed great attention to detail with it, he included a little scottish flair paying homage to the locale of the Story.
Character: I really love the Characters in this story, when you have a film that makes you care about the characters and what happens to them, You generally want to see these characters survive the hell they have found themselves in. I really would like to go in depth on this but I'm not very eloquent when it comes to talking about other people. I think what I really like about this film is the character development regarding Marco, when you first see him you honestly think this man is an complete asshole but over time you really start to learn he is a flesh and blood human being like the rest of us and that he too carries around wounds of the heart.
Enjoyment: I absolutely loved this movie, I think I could definitely watch it again, if the animation could have just been fixed as well the ending just a tiny bit this may be one of the best Anime Films to have ever been made, I know I won't forget this movie.
Overall: King of Thorn has it's flaws, but it has some of the most beautiful 2D Animation and Music you will experience in your life.
