Testing the unknown

So, I just watched Sintel, the new Blender Foundation short film. Here's what I think:

• Story: Imo the problem with the flic is that it tries to tell some sort of epic story with great pictures and stuff, but the pace at which the story develops just won't allow it to get epic in the 10 minutes it lasts. I mean just compare it to "Elephants Dream" where you are dropped into the middle of the action and you stumble through that world without any real explanations (hey, the stuff the crazy old man says can not count as explanations). In Sintel the storyteller really takes her time for a long flashback and stuff, making the story much less compressed and spreading it out over a long time (which personally annoys me). Also there are no real questions left at the end to ask (except little-princess-like "will she raise that 2nd dragon baby too, now?" ).
• Graphics: I have to say I'm really disappointed about this point. It looked like the film (I downloaded the 2048*872 mp4-version) was rendered without any texture filtering, making many textures look annoyingly crisp and edgy. Also some details don't look finished at all (eg some objects looked suspiciously untextured) and some stuff looked plain unnatural or broken (noticed many rendering errors). But the part that really annoys me about this is that both the previous films (Elephants Dream, Big Buck Bunny) looked perfectly rendered to me, but seemingly somebody blew it with Sintel.
  I mean the thing is, some stuff looks really good (eg that embossed logo on her late weapon, the dragons of course, that strange tree), but then some stuff looks really bad (eg the "wet" staff in one scene ... wtf? wood doesn't look like this if it's just wet, It looks more like you put it in lube or something). And it's this sharp contrast in quality that makes the bad parts stick out so much which is a sad thing.
• Animations: Again it's the "some stuff is great, some stuff stinks" problem. For instance in the first scene (jeah, first scene where the hero is introduced and everything should be perfect) the camera drifts over the mountains and you see the main character trudge over a mountainside (did I use trudge correctly?). So far so good, but that walking animation just looks so wooden an unnatural that you'd want to vomit. I mean who puts stuff like that in the first ever encounter with the main char? That's just cruel. Another great example is the dragons. They have awesome flying animations and all, but at one point a baby dragon crawls around and it just looks like his model is shifting over the floor without any discernible movement at all. That contrast just hurts!

Conclusio:
Well, I have to say, I didn't like Sintel that much. Sadly the quality both of the story and the visual presentation were not even close to being equal to the other two Blender Foundation films (but well, those were awesome). I am especially disappointed at the visual presentation which really showed some glitches that could have been prevented (eg. rendering errors).


PS: Please don't hate me for my honest criticism, I think it's better to say stuff the way you mean it.
PPS: If some sentences don't make sense: I'm sory, it's 01:42 in the morning here.