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Battledream Chronicle (2015)

★½ — Battledream Chronicle (2015)

Battledream Chronicle is a remarkable production footnote as much as a film: made in Martinique on a budget of around $400,000, it is widely regarded as the first animated feature film ever produced in the French Antilles. Director Alain Bidard, working through his own company Pagod Films, essentially built the project from scratch with a skeleton crew, handling much of the animation work himself over several years. The film arrives at an interesting cultural moment, when the science fiction genre was seeing renewed interest in stories of colonial oppression reframed through speculative fiction, and Bidard has spoken openly about drawing on Martinique's own history of slavery and resistance as source material for the premise.

A-Z World Movie Tour Martinique I wanted to like it. I really did. It’s rare to see an animated fantasy epic from Martinique! But wow… this is just bad. The art style looks like someone spilled neon paint on a fever dream and called it a look. The animation is stiff, awkward, and often looks like it was rendered on early-2000s software (which tbf it probably was) The story is a mess of half-baked ideas, random characters, and zero emotional grounding. There’s a “chosen one,” some magic nonsense, and a lot of yelling, but not a single moment that made me care. It tries so hard to be epic, but ends up being just exhausting. Painfully clunky in every department. One of those films that makes you question whether the filmmakers had any idea what they were doing or if they were just winging it.

Rating: ★½ | Year: 2015 | Watched: 2025-07-16

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Where to watch (UK)

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Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK

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