Cinematography was good, animation was superb (the fairy tale especially). Acting was par, with a few bumps. The Harry/Hermonie fanservice got an eyebrow out of me, and, like when I read the book, I found myself laughing over the circumstances of Doby's death.
But the plot was filler, as I knew it would be, and in the first quarter there wasn't enough character-to-character engagement. This I found really frustrating, as there are many good two part movies (Kill Bill, Titanic, Sound of Music) that all have very good, engaging first parts, but because it was modeled after a book that didn't have a specific sub-climax, the movie felt overall...like Maximum Ride. Fight, run, fight, run, fight, run, with a bit of character playing going on in between. So, fair movie, just don't expect to come out of it feeling all that more excited than you did after the first ten minutes.
*Dobby
Yeah, fight, run, etc. was kind of all that happened in the first half of the book... But it was still written much better than Maximum Ride. I absolutely loved the animation in the Tale of the Three Brothers - that might have been my favorite part of the whole movie. The Harry/Hermione thing wasn't supposed to happen at all... Harry never had a thing for Hermione, ever. There was a lot more detail in it than I expected there to be, but it still left out stuff I thought to be important. Still, it was closer to the book than the rest of the movies. I saw it for the second time today, and I've read the book three times. Yes, I'm a super-nerd. ^-^
I was wondering if Doby was a different character who had a humorous death that i didn't know about having never read the books. I cried when Dobby died, man. He was my favorite.
I liked Dobby a lot. :( I mostly cried at the beginning of the book when I thought for a minute that Hagrid was dead, though. And then at the end when I was looking over my list of who was gone.