Urduja was alright. Not great, but not terrible either.

Wait, what am I talking about? For those who are only in-tune with what’s new from the other side of Pacific, ClickTheCity provides us with a good primer:

The Philippines has a pretty long history in animation, though few people really care to notice. Filipino animators have worked on the likes of Scooby Doo, Captain Planet and The Incredibles, providing talent for foreign outfits. Urduja is the first major effort to create a local animated feature, and though it still isn’t a full showcase of what we can do, it’s a pretty great effort.

The film tells a tale of Urduja, the legendary warrior princess of Pangasinan. Her father, the chief of the tribe, has fallen ill. Simakwel, an ambitious young warrior, seeks to gain the chiefdom by marrying the headstrong princess. But his plan encounters a hurdle when the dashing pirate Lim Hang arrives on their shores and saves Urduja from a Badjao arrow. Lim Hang and Urduja begin to play out a forbidden love, while Simakwel schemes to take back what he saw as his rightful place.

Being a locally produced animated feature film, I honestly did not expect Disney-caliber quality in terms of animation. There’s just no way around it; animation wholly produced here just isn’t ready to compete on a world stage yet. And it shows in the movie: the animation jumps from frame to frame in an irregular fashion, faces and bodies morph a bit during movement, and frames per second doesn’t stay consistent throughout the entire film. Sometimes scenes move along well, and sometimes they really don’t.

Another thing of note was the sound quality. During the first part of the movie dialogue was nearly inaudible due to great amounts of noise in the recording. Characters felt like they were far away from the scene they were actually in when they talked. Sometimes I even heard a bit of an echo in their voices. It sure wasn’t the cinema I watched this in. This led to a bit of confusion in the first part of the film, especially when coupled by a few snags in the animation. I really couldn’t understand what some of the characters were saying in the early segments.

What I didn’t expect at all, but enjoyed anyway, were the song numbers. In another moment of emulating standards set by Disney there were songs interspersed within the movie. Some of these songs were pretty forgettable (Kukut and Tarsir’s song comes to mind, which one could almost say tries to copy Hakuna Matata), although some were pretty good melodies as well, like the one sung by Lim Hang, even more so when you consider that Cesar Montano isn’t really a trained singer.

It lacks polish, and I definitely think Pinoys can do better. Still, at the end of the day no one can really say that Urduja isn’t something. The animation for all its odd hiccups serves its job of conveying the narrative. The dialogue, while a bit bumpy due to its mixing of old Filipino ideals with modern colloquial language, sees the audience safely to the end. And while the animators are still using a lot of ideas first made famous by Western studios, at least it’s applied to a distinctly Filipino milieu.

Urduja is definitely something to start on, and maybe years from now it will be looked back upon as the foundation of great Philippine animation. But for now, it’s just an alright effort.