3 increasingly anti-corporate takes on The Minecraft Movie

I haven't seen this film, so this is all based on how the animation looks. Specifically, how a sheep in the Minecraft game is some blocks with flat textures, and how a sheep in the Minecraft movie has thousands of individually rendered hair follicles each with their own inertia and shading.

Level 1

This is your entry level anti-corporate take. The execs at whatever-studio-bought-the-rights don't "get" how a scene created in Minecraft can be beautiful. It looks cheap. It looks weird.

I played a bunch of Minecraft, about a decade ago, and there is definite emergent beauty in it. You can be running around, collecting wood for some project, and you are just stopped in your tracks by a sunset over a valley. These are basic little blocks, that you've been running around on for an hour, but together they paint a picture, and it is a work of art.

The Hollywood types don't get this.

Level 2

Let's turn up the anti-corporate vibe and see where it takes us. 

Sure, Minecraft graphics are beautiful, and a movie made with them in their base form could be striking and original. But it's not a safe bet. This is a competition and we've gotta look better than the Playmobil movie, or whatever else is out next.

Let's reject the novel approach here, knowing it has value, and create something less risky, more uniform.

Level 3

If the Minecraft movie looked like Minecraft then where is the line between folk art and corporate-funded art? If you show a theatre full of 8-year-olds something that they could do at home, then why would they come to the theatre? If we don't use inaccessible tools on this project, how else can we communicate to those 8-year-olds that what they create is Less Than?

Conclusion

I bet this movie is good. I bet they got some writers to drill down into the core of what makes Minecraft popular, and pull out a message about creativity and exploration.

I think I would have just preferred to see fewer hair follicles on those sheep.