I like the premise of a story split between a play and its actors, but I’m having some problems with the execution.
The three brothers feel like they’re supposed to be important characters (the ram has things to say about their actors), but I have trouble thinking about them as individual characters except that one of them is strong and stupid and another one is the main one. The one who is supposed to be smart doesn’t really show that much smarts. There’s a lot of direct exposition with them talking about their motivations and plans and the lore of the world compared to the scenes between the demon and the princess/the ram and the fox. When the princess asks the demon about what it means to be a demon, it’s an interaction on a personal level in addition to being a vehicle for delivery of factual information to the reader. There is a layer of familial relationships over the scene where the brothers talk about the layout of the tower, but it isn’t nearly as interesting and doesn’t carry the same plot weight. It tells us something about their relationship, but it doesn’t progress that relationship or tell us much of importance.
The quality of presentation was uneven. The scene with the princess meeting the demon was done nicely with the camera motion and blood and CG of the eyes in the bush, and there are some neat transitions between the play and the actors (both in the writing and the visuals), but there are also some transitions and animations that are missing, with sprites appearing very suddenly on the screen.
We get the contrast between the stage lights and the director in the darkness (in a good way), and the scene outside behind the building is cool (it’s a much more intimate space than the stage), but the background for the scene where the princess drinks the water is strangely bare, and the princess sprite doesn’t have enough contrast with the similarly-coloured gravel behind it. Hopefully these things will be able to be tidied up now that the jam deadline is no longer looming over us.
I like the parallel going between the fox/princess and ram/demon. How both the ram and the demon are helping the fox and princess to live their lives boldly and authentically, and how the transition to the CG where the demon is picking up the limping princess could almost be about the ram picking up the fox. The ram makes an offhand comment about the ending of the play early on, and I’m curious to see what it’s setting up.