Let's get the obvious out of the way first. This is a movie made on a shoe-string budget, using comic panels with the occasionally moving figure done in straight-up stop-motion fashion. There's some animation of the most basic sort (wavy lines representing water, for instance, were animated in a very simple fashion, or stylized eyes blinking) but nothing along the lines of what modern animation programs can do on a basic laptop. There's no way around these facts, and the result is exactly what you'd expect. It would be disingenuous to pretend that's not a fairly low bar, even in the early 2000s. The artwork itself (entirely black and white) is a mixture of cartoonish and semi-realistic (I was actually familiar with the artist's renditions of various Lovecraftian tales before I ever watched this) and depends a lot on chiaroscuro and shading effects. It has to be taken on its own merits. You're not getting even comic book quality, but that's not a criticism -- it's an observation. Some people love this sort of art; others demand more realistic (and colorized) art. De gustibus and all.
With that out of the way, let's talk about what the movie is rather than what it isn't. It is a (slightly inelegant) solution to the problem of how to actually make a movie out of a sprawling and extremely fantastical story. "Dreamquest" is an almost quintessential 'unfilmable' piece. The budget necessary to film a live-action version capable of doing justice to the material would be astronomical, especially for such a niche story with limited general appeal. A traditionally animated one would be less onerous, but once again we hit the issue of budget to appeal ratio. What this movie is is an attempt to bring the story to life through visuals using the best means at the disposal of, well, a creator with virtually no budget. And that's definitely worth appreciating. Fans of the original story might crave a world where it could get the same cinematic treatment as 'Lord of the Rings' or 'Harry Potter,' but the realistic ones know this simply isn't feasible. What we have here is what *is* feasible, and it's very obviously a labor of love. If you set aside preconceptions (which I know can be difficult) and take this movie on its own merits, it can be quite a fun watch. Perhaps more than most cinematic adaptions of beloved stories, this is going to appeal mos to people who are intimately familiar with the source text and the mythos of the Dreamlands over the range of Lovecraft's entire bibliography. But those unfamiliar with the source text can still enjoy the watch, though ready access to Google and the various Lovecraft fan sites would not be amiss.
One complaint I have centers on the voice work. Not the quality of it (as a couple other reviewers have focused on) but on the fact that the Lovecraft text had no dialogue and only a single instance of (lengthy) monologue toward the end. This was, I feel, done by Lovecraft to enhance the dreamlike nature of the story, to keep the more mundane practical phenomena out of the text so the reader is drawn along with the story rather than subjected to reminders of real-world behavior. It's this very dreamlike aspect that makes the story so addictive to read, and I find the creation of dialogue to express what was only described in the text itself jarring and not in keeping with the mood the text was trying to instill. Personally, I feel a skilled narrator doing occasional voice-over would have been a much better choice. Luckily, I know the story by heart, so I could watch the music-only version without losing anything, but most people don't remember the story so thoroughly, if they've even read it at all. But that's a personal complaint, though I suspect many others have the same appreciation I do for the the dreamlike qualities of the text.
All in all, though, I do appreciate this movie and appreciate the fact that somebody cared enough about the story to go to all this effort to film it.
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