Voice acting
One thing that I found really distracting was the voice acting. I pay attention to this sort of things because OMG VA FAN and all that, but I have a few beefs with this film.
Well, one beef.
Matt Damon. Good god. He's a main character, and one with character design and animation that limits facial expressions. He talks with such a toned down, blah approach that watching/listening to him is boring. A good voice actor could've brought so much to this role. He could've made up for the inability to, say, bug his eyes out or make any of the wonderful expressions the aliens could make. But he delivered lines like he was half asleep. It's like he had no range.
I have no beef with Bill Pullman. I thought he did a good job as Korso. Pullman in general is no A-list actor, but he knows how and when to raise his voice and sound like good guy in one scene and bad in the next. The role didn't require much, but he did a good job, I thought.
Drew Barrymore did okay, too. Not spectacular, but I don't think her role gave her much to do, either. She could've done a lot with it, but in most situations, she sounds like she's flirting with Cale. Unless that's what they wanted, maybe they could've made a better choice.
Loved Nathan Lane, John Leguizamo, and Janeanne Goraffalo. Their voices added the touch of sophistication, high-pitched innocence, and scruffy no-nonsense their characters needed. The fact that they were aliens and got the benefit of a lot less rigid style of animation probably helped, but I'm not sure how much.
Moral of the story: Don't hire someone to voice-act your movie just because they're crazy-famous at the time. Hire them because they're good voice actors. No pun intended, but voice actors have to have animated voices and act THROUGH their voices in order to make up for the lack of gesture and everything visual actors do. Of course, it's the animators' job to make up for it, but... Well, you know what I'm getting at.
Feel free to disagree. Others were maybe pulled out of the movie due to the lack of plot (which I didn't see an issue with--guy has a map to a colony of humans, people want to get to colony for various reasons, hit snags along the way, etc.), or distracted by the CGI/classical animation mix, but for me, it was Cale's awful voice actor. Oh Cale, I dislike you as a character because you're a horrible cliché, but maybe you could've been salvaged with a VA with some energy to his performance.
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You can spend the rest of your life with me, but I cant spend the rest of mine with you.