YMMV / Welcome to Marwen

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• Accidental Aesop: Bullies have no principles, nor is their hatred based in any logic. They will bully anyone they can if and because they feel like it. Mark's attackers ask him if he's gay before committing their hate crime, but it's clear that they don't actually care whether or not he is. They just beat him up because they can and want to.
• Animation Age Ghetto: Possibly the main reason the film flopped. Whereas most mainstream American Animated films that are rated PG-13 are either comedies or Action that try to be live action, Welcome to Marwen was a Drama and was actively trying to look animated.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: Trying to make a feel-good story out of the independent documentary Marwencol (in which a man is beaten for crossdressing to the point of being mentally impaired afterward, with the man eventually creating a fictional town as a way of healing from the trauma) is a difficult task in and of itself. Using photorealistic CGI for the dolls of that town is something that can produce off-putting results, as the film's director can attest to with reception to some of his other movies dealing with performance capture. Adding CGI-heavy action scenes reminiscent of Sucker Punch on top of that is a good way of appealing to absolutely nobody. A lack of critical support for the movie (aside from a few performances) and subsequent awards buzz effectively doomed the movie be a flop, losing the studio $60 million and sending Robert Zemeckis's career into another slump.
• Fridge Horror: It is heavily implied that Deja's plot to take Hoagie with her on the Time Machine was an allegory for Mark attempting suicide by overdosing on his pills.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: While most would agree that the film makes better use of Motion Capture than Robert Zemeckis's All-CGI Cartoon films, especially because it makes for a striking difference between the fantasy and real worlds, seeing the main live-action characters rendered as CGI dolls still looks kind of creepy.

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