They do manage to convince him of course, and that's really the purpose of this first 30 minutes. There isn't a particularly grand story here, with the entire film simply setting up what the team is, showing us some training, and setting the stage to convince this one character to join up.

The writing is very basic, and some of the dialog unrealistic and stilted. There is a little twist in the story if you're paying attention, implying that the kindly old billionaire might not be quite so kindly when there is something he wants, but overall you know exactly where this is going. And really the entire story is just a set up for the stop-motion work.

The voice talent is the biggest problem for the entire film. They need to consider either working very hard on their own abilities in this department, or finding some local acting talent for the next film. Much of the dialog sounds like it's being read from the page, and the occasional attempt at accents or unique speech patterns is truly bad. The one bright spot in the voice acting is Cecille Valin, who handles all the female voices. While you'll recognize immediately that it's the same woman, her ability to put the correct inflection and tone into her few lines was much appreciated.

As I said, the story and acting are merely window dressing, and the real purpose here is to showcase the stop-motion sixth scale world they've created. That they've done admirably. There's lots of motion throughout, and while a few more frames here or there would have smoothed things out a bit, overall the action looks good. There are several hand to hand fight scenes, and the punches, kicks and flips all work well. Also, rather than animate the mouths, they use head and body movement and posture to signal speech. This was a smart move, and does give you as much emotion from the characters as you could expect.

The film itself is presented in full screen. The music and sound are in stereo, and sounded fairly good when I used a Dolby Prologic set up. You might want to try playing around with 5 or 7 channel stereo as well to see how it sounds.  The music itself is an interesting techno mix, and was done specifically for the film. It conveys the mood of most scenes well, but is often too loud and tends to jump in your face, rather than provide background ambiance.

There's also a short (20 minute) commentary by Philip Lane, co-creator and director, answering some of the more common questions. It's not bad, but I would have preferred some actual footage showing them working through the process of stop-motion, behind-the-scenes footage of their discussions and working together, and maybe even some more in depth information on the building of the dioramas.

You can also jump to various scenes, but there are only five of these provided.  I also couldn't use the timer to jump to a particular moment on the DVD, so you'll find yourself fast forwarding and rewinding a lot if you're trying to get to a particular scene.  That's not particularly surprising for a low budget, self produced effort like this.

In the end, what this film really reminds me of is if you got together with a bunch of your friends and did a movie with your action figures - which is exactly what they did. The writing and voice acting are nothing spectacular, and the film won't be getting any awards, but the dioramas and stop-action work is better than average. The obvious purpose of this movie is to show off the stop-action, with story and acting taking a distant back seat on the bus. While that's fine for the first attempt, I hope to see more attention paid to what the filmmakers want to say with the medium, rather than just playing with the medium itself.

Stop-action is a form of animation, and animation works best when it's used to tell a story that otherwise might not be possible. Films like Fantasia, Toy Story, Chicken Run or Monsters Inc. have at their core excellent stories that are perfect fits for the medium, and would be difficult or impossible to do in any other way. That's what I think AFM needs to focus on - finding stories that make sense with the use of action figures. Simply telling stories that could just as easily be done with human actors will leave their audiences unexcited and less likely to come back for more. Worse, human actors and true animated characters are able to provide much greater emotion and expression than action figures. That hinders them further from being able to really exploit any sort of serious plot in a way that the audience can except.

There are plots out there that would benefit from this though, and would most likely be a combination of human and action figure interaction. Allow the action figures to BE action figures, and don't try to use them to simply replace humans. I think that moving in that direction would open up a lot of possibilities for them, and also allow them to gain a much wider audience. Storm Cloud would never be a film festival entrant, but I can imagine story lines and plots that could use their skill sets and be neat independent films.

The DVD is $20, the VHS tape is $15. The DVD has the additional director commentary, missing from the VHS version. You can order it directly from the site, but is it worth it?  If you can only afford to buy one DVD this month, I wouldn't make it this one. However, if you are a big action figure collector (which is pretty likely if you're reading this column), and you can afford spending a little guilty pleasure money, you might want to pick this one up. It's a fun watch for you
and your fellow collectors, and you may find it bringing out the kid in you, sparking an interest in
combining your action figures with film. If you do pick this up, take my advice and DO NOT let any of your non-collecting friends and family watch this - unless they are under the age of 10. If you do, you'll never live it down.