12 Great Movies That Are Visually Flat

Gotta love Pulp Fiction's TV-movie style directing.

Pulp Fiction Jules Vincent
Miramax

Film is a visual medium. Therefore, the quality of the directing, cinematography and editing are essential to a film working at all. Additionally, films being visually striking is often what will elevate a film to a higher level of quality.

So in that case, surely being visually stunning is absolutely essential for a film being great, right? Actually, no. Since film is constructed from so many different moving parts - such as acting, screenplay and story - a film can still be absolutely awesome if it gets those other things right, even if the visuals are flat.

These following twelve movies are great examples of this. They are disappointingly weak on a visual level but they do still offer a well-rounded and strong viewing experience overall since they were so on-point in terms of their writing and performances. That they managed to overcome this major flaw so well is a testament to their overall strength.

12. Hoodwinked!

Pulp Fiction Jules Vincent
TWC

Hoodwinked might be the most underrated animated film of all time.

A mystery story featuring Red Riding Hood's characters and told in a similar style to Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, Hoodwinked is a hilarious, genuinely clever and superbly-written low-budget animation that's also got a collection of terrific vocal performances.

It is a criminally under-appreciated movie - which is arguably better than Shrek (Editor's note: it's not) - and the critical scores are unfairly low, but one thing critics were bang-on right about was that the animation is truly awful.

Partly because it's far more low-budget than most animated films, the entire thing looks like it was made for TV; it is truly rare to see such unappealing visuals in a commercially-released animated film. The atrocious CGI is pretty distracting, but the film is still very much worth seeing and if you can overlook this, you're in for a treat.

Just don't go anywhere near the sequel.

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Film Studies graduate, aspiring screenwriter and all-around nerd who, despite being a pretentious cinephile who loves art-house movies, also loves modern blockbusters and would rather watch superhero movies than classic Hollywood films. Once met Tommy Wiseau.