I watch a lot of things for this blog, things I would not normally watch on my own. On the one hand, this has introduced me to movies that I loved like Isle of Dogs, The Adventures of Tintin, and Encanto. On the other hand, it means I often have to watch movies like this. I mean, what is this movie? No seriously what is it, and why was it worthy of a theatrical release?
This movie comes to us from Gold Valley Films an animation studio that is most known for... well probably this movie now. They've done a few other movies, like Academy of Magic and a Mulan movie, but I don't believe either of those got a theatrical release in my city. Did they get a theatrical release elsewhere, I'm genuinely curious, I'd love to know. Anyway, I have to wonder why this movie got a theatrical release. It doesn't look like a theatrical movie, it isn't written like one, and it's a sequel, yeah this movie is a sequel, it follows the events to Cinderella and the Secret Prince from 2018. Which is probably a good time to mention that the date in the title is not entirely accurate. See, this movie was actually released in 2021, IMDb and Letterboxd both say this. However, it is my policy that movies that get theatrical releases, or big releases on a major streaming service, in one year count as a movie for that year. This is why I consider Animal Crackers a 2020 movie and not a 2017 movie. It's initial release was 2017, but it was released onto Netflix in 2020, likewise this movie got a theatrical release in 2022.
I am half convinced this movie got a theatrical release either as a joke or a test. Like someone wanted to see if there was still a viable option for animated films that weren't Disney or DreamWorks, so they just grabbed some movie that was released last year, held onto it until the "Box Office Bomb" season was over, but didn't hold on to it for so long as to make it seem like a good movie. Hell, I barely saw any advertising for this movie, there was like a mini-trailer they played in the lobby, and there was one of those quiz-screens they show during the pre-show, and that was it. Clearly my theatre had no faith in the one, so I have to ask, why was it given a theatrical release?
The movie reminds me a lot of Arctic Dogs, because it had the look, feel and writing of a direct to video movie. At the very least Arctic Dogs had a pretty good sized cast, with the likes of Alec Baldwin, Heidi Klum, John Cleese, Anjelica Huston, James Franco and Michael Madsen. This movie doesn't even have a very recognizable cast. Then again, this movie was better than Arctic Dogs, to some extent.
The animation was just not theatrical quality. A lot of movements looked mechanical, like I could almost see the motion paths the characters and objects were following. Some of the mouth movements didn't look right, and I'm not sure if this was because they dubbed the dialogue or if it was always just that mediocre. They also made a lot of the character models to be non-human, which I feel is something that a lot of direct-to-video kids movies do, like "this character has no reason to be a tortoise, but let's make him one anyway, what else? We need someway to have the characters cross the ocean? Okay what models do we have? The Globglogabgalab? whatever make it fluffy and we'll call it a cloud!".
Then there is the writing, and seriously, there was a good amount of this movie I could just see coming. Like, they had out main characters split up, and for a while it "Looks" like one of the characters is gonna turn evil. I mean, can you guess the others are gonna go back for her and try to talk her back onto their side? I guess I should be too hard on this, because this is a movie for really little kids, and this could probably be their first exposure to this kind of conflict, but it was just so badly written. If I didn't see a plot point or a punchline coming, it was still predictable either way.
I know this movie is for really little kids, but so was the Blue's Clues movie, and that was still a good movie. It really is the difference between a show like Sesame Street and a show like Teletubbies. They're both for a similar audience, but there is a reason one has lasted for over fifty years and the other didn't. I guess it's not an absolutely awful movie, really it's more just a whole lot of nothing, but overall, I can't recommend it. At least it's better than Adventures of Buck Wild.
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