Cheap thrill, but still well worth your time if you're hankering for this type of fix.
I kept thinking how incredibly contrived and heavy handed this film is. Its sentimentality reaches biblical proportions and I felt like I was being force fed. Despite this running through my head as I was watching, I still got a wee bit choked up at the last quarter, and I loathe to admit that such a blatantly manipulative piece of filmmaking got the better of me. I am a man, god damn it.
This is just one of those movies. You know the type. Pan's Labyrinth, MirrorMask, Tideland, The Fall and some others I'm sure I'm forgetting. A little kid lost in a big, mean and fantastical world yada yada a celebration of a child's imagination et cetera, topped with a generous helping of personal growth and a large side of lesson learned for dessert. Sure if you reduce them down to this level you're left with a bit of a sickly sweet and artificial flavour, and yet it doesn't matter one iota because all of them bring something unique and genuine to the equation. We all have our weaknesses, and this type of film is mine. While Imaginaerum has nothing on the greats I just mentioned and it suffers a little bit from a case of the cheapus productionitis, it will definitely take you a fair way there.
Most of this movie is driven by CG effects, and some of it is kinda hit and miss; budgetary constraints are evident, however generally the art direction and excellent photography elevate it somewhat. Oh, and it is also kind of a musical. A band called Nightwish was the catalyst for getting this made, while I'm not too familiar with them it sure made the proceedings more interesting.
So you just read or watched or whatevered a really good story. You enjoyed this story. You got invested in the story and came to care about it. By all means, you extracted value from having experienced it. And then the story ends with something along the lines of '...and it was all a dream.'
A lot of people get a little bit militant in their hate for this, and if you're one of those people you're wrong. Still, you'd better avoid this one. For everyone else, this is a decent little middle of the shelf distraction.