Sing to the Dawn 720p - (2008 Lang: English)

Sing to the Dawn or Meraih Mimpi is a 2008 3D computer-animated musical film. The film was produced by Infinite Frameworks (IFW), a studio animation-based Batam, Mediacorp Raintree Pictures, Media Development Authority and Scorpio East Pictures. It is loosely on the eponymous novel by Minfong Ho that was first published in 1975.

The film was released on 30 October 2008 in Singapore, then Korea, Malaysia and Russia. The film has also been screened in Pusan International Film Festival on South Korea and in Santa Monica, AS. A localized version was released on 16 September 2009.

Dana (Gita Gutawa) is a little girl who lives in a small village in Batam. She lives with little sister, Rai (Patton Latupeirissa), father its Somad (Uli Herdinansyah) and grandmother commonly called "Oma" (Jajang C. Noer).

Pairot (Surya Saputra) is an entrepreneur and cruel landlord who often uses fashion and a wig styled after Elvis Presley. Pairot assessed the villagers with an oppressive land tax. He claimed that the entire land of the village was his, after he told villagers that he has a document from King Ramelan, the former ruler of the village. The village is unaware that Pairot is planning to evict the villagers and destroy the village to build a city with hotels and casinos.

After learning about Pairot's evil plans, Dana, with the help of her sister struggled to save her beloved village. With help from Grandfather Wiwien (Jose Rizal Manua), Dana tries to find the King's original will.

As a woman, Dana's life is filled with difficulties and sadness. One is that Dana was forced by her father to follow the village's patriarchal tradition. Her father wanted to marry her off to foolish Ben (Ipank), Pairot's son.

Dana and Rai are assisted by many friends, such as a group of cute jungle animals who can talk to each other, including bird parrots named Kakatu (Cut Mini), crow named Minah (Shanty), lizards (Ria Irawan), until bear named Tante Bear (Tike Priatnakusumah).


Accompanied with their animal friends Dana and Rai win scholarships and discover the landlord's secret.

Sing to the Dawn (2008) feels like an extremely long music video. Despite having numerous unique characters, from talking animals to the village people, the animation is quite poor. With stiff bodily and out of sync voice-lips movements, the animated feature feels not so animated at times but it does have a great voice actress for the musical part.

This might be mean but I find Sing to the Dawn (2008) one of the weirdest animated movie ever made. Weird not because it is poorly done, it is mostly due to the true origin of the movie being quite uncertain. Audiences from both countries mentioned that it is their very own with rare mentions of the other country despite it is a collaboration. Most confusing, the true director of the film is uncertain as well; unless we all got the wrong guy, the director seems not to acknowledge his own work too.

Nonetheless, Sing to the Dawn (2008) does have some funny moments and noteworthy theme. Even though nothing is fancy here as it is realistically set in a small village, it touches on important issues such as arranged marriage, private ownership and social status.

Overall? Sing to the Dawn (2008) is not a bad attempt since both countries are considered quite new to the animation industry but the origins of this animated feature is weird, making it difficult to analyse. Still, nothing's wrong with girl with dreams right? Some may enjoy this, but I don't...