Overall, this is a very visually striking film and you can tell a lot of effort went into making the look and the design. Also, even though the editing is a bit too snappy for my taste, as I know they had a lot of story that needed to be crammed into a short amount of time, I think it is great that more animations are experimenting with more cinematography techniques and styles rather than just aiming for generic "cinematic" techniques.
That being said, I feel like the theme is a bit weak/uneven. There's the very surface level of the story which is about a man who is obsessed with gold but is deaf and encounters a siren made of gold who kills all of his comrades but can't kill him due to him being deaf. She... er... sort of falls in love with him? Her chemistry for him is completely erotic and sexual in nature with no actual chemistry so it's a bit confusing as to whether or not she actually likes him because sirens are generally used in narratives as "seducers" who don't actually love their victims but pretend to.
Either way, she seduces him, he almost falls for it, but then knocks her out, steals her gold, and then runs off with the gold. Somehow his hearing comes back and the siren awakens and cries out in sorrow knowing her gold has been stolen. She then kills him for "betraying her trust" or something like that and she is now left all alone with a literal body count of hundreds and we are left with imagery wanting us to feel sympathy for her or something.
I can see the groundwork for a competent narrative here, the issue is that there's no reason for the protagonist to trust her after she has murdered hundreds of his people. To add to that, there's no reason why he should have to fall in love with her yet the film portrays it as some sort of "tragic betrayal of true love" even though all she does is seductive/erotic dancing, kill his friends, and cause him injuries over and over again. When he does "betray her" it is treated in the same sort "rape imagery" metaphor that Maleficent did back in 2014, but it doesn't work here because there was no betrayal of emotions.
I can't feel sorry for a relationship falling apart that never existed in the first place, and even less so about one that has killed hundreds of people. Again, I have a pretty good understanding of what the subtext is supposed to be about, but I don't think the subtext connects with the main text.
That being said, I feel like the theme is a bit weak/uneven. There's the very surface level of the story which is about a man who is obsessed with gold but is deaf and encounters a siren made of gold who kills all of his comrades but can't kill him due to him being deaf. She... er... sort of falls in love with him? Her chemistry for him is completely erotic and sexual in nature with no actual chemistry so it's a bit confusing as to whether or not she actually likes him because sirens are generally used in narratives as "seducers" who don't actually love their victims but pretend to.
Either way, she seduces him, he almost falls for it, but then knocks her out, steals her gold, and then runs off with the gold. Somehow his hearing comes back and the siren awakens and cries out in sorrow knowing her gold has been stolen. She then kills him for "betraying her trust" or something like that and she is now left all alone with a literal body count of hundreds and we are left with imagery wanting us to feel sympathy for her or something.
I can see the groundwork for a competent narrative here, the issue is that there's no reason for the protagonist to trust her after she has murdered hundreds of his people. To add to that, there's no reason why he should have to fall in love with her yet the film portrays it as some sort of "tragic betrayal of true love" even though all she does is seductive/erotic dancing, kill his friends, and cause him injuries over and over again. When he does "betray her" it is treated in the same sort "rape imagery" metaphor that Maleficent did back in 2014, but it doesn't work here because there was no betrayal of emotions.
I can't feel sorry for a relationship falling apart that never existed in the first place, and even less so about one that has killed hundreds of people. Again, I have a pretty good understanding of what the subtext is supposed to be about, but I don't think the subtext connects with the main text.