Beowulf

I've recently realised that I have a problem with animated films. I've never really thought about it until now but it came to me in a blinding flash the other day that I have a real blind spot with them. It's the only genre with which I have difficulty - anything else I will go and see (except low-rent raucous US teen comedies which really are not accessible to people my age).
Which probably means I've missed out on some good stuff, so as I have a DVD of Belleville Rendezvous (it was free in a newspaper), I'll take a deep breath and watch it sometime soon.
I'm thinking about animation because I went to see Beowulf the other day - I took my 12-year old nephew as I thought he would probably enjoy it (he did), as it has battles, arrows, suits of armour, swords, flying dragons etc. etc. He spends a fair bit of time playing computer games which involve vast medieval armies so it was his sort of thing.
It was entirely computer-generated, with no discernible live action, but it was strangely messy; all you got of Ray Winstone (Beowulf) was his voice, whereas Anthony Hopkins was recognisably himself, except that he was computer-generated as well, if you get me. I'm having problems describing the film - it really was a bizarre experience. I suppose the fact that it was made to be shown in 3D contributes to the sense of disorientation I experienced, as nothing looked quite right. Robin Wright Penn plays the female lead (I have no idea what her name was) and her character looked very strange indeed , with a bizarrely elongated chin.
Ray Winstone bellowed his way through the film, and his (highly recognisable) voice was totally at odds with the gleaming, buffed-up physique of his computerised image.
There's some good dragon-killing action near the end, which was reasonably well done, and the story rattled along at a decent pace, but I kept thinking about John Boorman's Excalibur, a wonderful film of which I'm very fond. It deserves a decent DVD release, and it still hasn't got one. I await a special edition with anticipation.