Threshold Entertainment, 1995

Being the first to do something is not always the greatest achievement. Mortal Kombat: The Journey Begins may have been the first CGI animated movie, but that’s not exactly a glowing endorsement. Thankfully, the story and lore compensate and swing the overall product back to neutral territory.

Go into Journey Begins knowing a few things: The animation and CGI are absolutely horrible, the voice acting is decent, and the story is bound to tell you a few things you might not have known from only playing the games. Journey Begins is basically a rehash of the first live-action movie and also a giant commercial for it and the then-new Mortal Kombat 3. With a lot of retread and some scenes lifted straight from the movie, Journey Begins traverses little new ground.

The problem isn’t the retread, however; it’s the presentation. Journey Begins looks terrible. The animation and rudimentary CGI design are so bad it’s distracting from the story at hand. The hand-drawn animation is ugly and janky, the character movement is atrocious, there’s unnecessary slowdown and blurring, and the CGI is uncomfortably hideous. It looks like an amateur artist taught themselves color theory in Adobe Photoshop and then put it into Animate and forgot to turn bevel and contour off.

With more lore that was hinted at in the course of the games and good voice acting from big names, however, Journey Begins manages to salvage its dignity. I can’t recommend this unless you’re a massive fan of the Mortal Kombat franchise, are curious about obscure parts of MK lore or you want to see a piece of animation history from the long-ago time of 1995. – Lyndsey