Beowulf the Animated Feature - An interesting idea

This is not an actual edit in the works, that's why I'm posting in the technical section.  This has been fun to toy with though.

To be completely honest, I have not yet been able to completely watch Beowulf because the characters give me the creeps.

The reason for this is because the CG work falls into the Uncanny Valley.  (If you don't know what that is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)  The simple explaination is that as something synthetic becomes closer to looking human there is a point that we find it revolting and unnatural.

Well since we can't make it look MORE realistic, we can make it look LESS realistic.  My first idea was to go fully animated looking, but even the best version of that failed to make the mask-like rigor on people's faces tolerable:

The next tests involved going more paint brush/impressionistic and I was actually surprised by how much better it looked:

Here's a clip:

http://www.mediafire.com/?jmwyz3mdc13 (8mb)

Would I go on to make a full movie version of this?  Doubtful.  It's painfully slow to encode, I'm betting each scene would need separate settings for best appearance... and I don't know if the movie is even worth my time.

For those intersted in playing around, I used a VirtualDub filter called MSU Cartoonizer for all the work and it can be integrated into avisynth.  (The settings are customized though.)