First Impressions: Ella and the Little Sorcerer (AKA Little Sorcerer; AKA Cinderella and the Spell Binder) (2022)

 

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.

First Impressions: Turning Red (2022)

 

Okay, full admission here, I did not really want to do this. Not that this is a bad movie, far from it, I think it's really well done. However, it is not a movie for me. Sometimes you watch a movie that is just not something you're into, and that's okay. However, this movie has a lot of... discourse for want of a better term, surrounding it, and to top it all off Disney is facing another controversy, and if that wasn't enough, there is a certain blog post or two that may need some addressing. So, I'm going to give you my very quick thoughts on the movie, the stuff I liked about it, the stuff I didn't really like, and then I'll go into all of the other stuff surrounding it.

So, Turning Red. I don't think I really get to talk about Pixar on this blog that much, I mean the last First Impressions blog I did on one of the studio's movies was Onward, and the last Pixar movie to get a proper review was Toy Story 3 back when I did my Toy Story marathon in preparation for Toy Story 4. I really don't talk about Pixar that much, and it's a shame because they are one of my favourite studios. Granted I haven't watched all of their movies, but I definitely put them pretty much at the same height as Laika. So I was at least interested in Turning Red on the merit that it's the latest Pixar film. Pixar has been doing something very interesting recently, as more and more of their movies are about people. I mean they still have their movie about a non-human protagonist, but for most of the 2010s, they've been about people or human like people. I think this is a very interesting direction and I'm curious to see where it will lead.

As for Turning Red itself, I do think it's a good movie. I really like the animation style, sure the mouths did take a bit to get used to, but the eyes, oh my goodness the eyes. The eyes were like a perfect mix of anime expressiveness and CG liveliness. On top of that I love the character designs, I like how they aren't the typical "Little Girl" type designs, they aren't the "glitz and glamour Hollywood picture perfect" cute girl design. I think this is wonderful. I'm not too fond of the writing, well, not too fond of it until the last third or so of the movie. Look, one of my biggest worries of Encanto was that I was going to tell where it was gonna go and, yeah I had that feeling at times during the movie. However, the characters, I think we all knew at least one of these kids growing up, like we all knew a Sid or a Remy, we either knew these kids or were one of these kids. I like Mei's father, I think he's a great parental figure. This movie is full of good elements, and I do not want anyone to walk away from this post thinking that I hated this movie, aside from the plot, I like pretty much everything about this movie. Plus, being set in Canada just made it a bit more familiar for me, granted I've never been to Toronto (West coast is best coast), but still, it's nice to see a more mainstream movie that is set in my home country.

So, why was the movie getting scrutiny before it came out? Some people didn't like the art style, some people thought the characters weren't realistically written, and some people just think a movie like this counts as pandering. Look, it's okay if you don't like the art style, being someone who never cared for Klasky-Csupo I get it, sometimes a style just does not appeal to you. However, I don't think I've ever used Klasky-Csupo to put down anything, not western animation, not 90s cartoons, not Nickelodeon. That is one thing I can't stand about animation discourse, most people will just look at one piece of western animation they don't like and try to hold up some garbage anime because "It looks better, forget the story and characters, looks are all that matters." Yeah, this is why I stopped playing modern video games. If you don't like the visual style, that's fine, but don't act as if that is the be all or end all of a cartoon or movie. As for the other complaints, I'm not even gonna dignify them. Maybe these kids don't act like real kids, and Sponges don't live in Pineapples, and traumatized children don't fight crime dressed as a bat, it is fiction, and it can take some liberties, and if this movie is pandering, than what would you call it if Pixar made a movie specifically to cater towards the people complaining about this movie, because that is also pandering you know.

And about my previous Pixar post, I wanted to save that for this post, but I wrote that all the way in January because I just could not hold onto it until now. So, do I still think Pixar is in trouble? Maybe it is a bit pessimistic to see Pixar and the "next Blue Sky Studios", but I'm still gonna be cautious about it. We'll see how Lightyear gets treated and then I'll make the call on whether I was right or wrong. Really, I was envisioning this post a lot more like my Adventures of Buck Wild post, which I spent just ragging on Disney and that was the plan for that post. Man, if only I had waited, then I could have written something about Bob Chapek funding the "Don't Say Gay" bill in Florida, which tells people by law what they can and can't say, which is censorship. Literal, actual censorship that is against the first amendment. #DisneySayGay #DontSayGayisCensorship

No, I'm still not gonna forgive Disney, for anything. However, I will be honest and say when I'm urinating on their head. Turning Red is a good movie, I think it's a well-made outing from Pixar, do I think it's gonna be the best animated movie of the year? Considering what I have seen so far, I don't think so. Really this just is not a movie for me, I'm putting this along side Coraline and Wolfwalkers. However, even in those cases I do have to say that the movie is still worth seeing, so what if it isn't for me? It's not hurting anyone by existing (Music), asking people to look past some really insensitive material (Dog) or being an insult to cinema or animation (The list of movies I could name here are numerous, so let's just pick The Lion King 2019 as the blanket example), if you enjoy it, I'm not going to fuss. It is not my thing, but I still give it a recommendation.

Felidae (1994) - A Dark and Thrilling Mystery Movie for Adults

There are some movies that have a reputation for very understandable reasons. I'm not talking about a "So bad it's good" reputation or a "annoying fanbase" reputation here, I'm talking controversy, and a weird grey area of controversy, an area where the film was controversial enough to warrant a limited release, but not enough to be full on banned. Felidae is a German movie that did not get a major release in English speaking countries, and while I can find no evidence of this movie being banned in any country, as far as most people are concerned it may as well be. Felidae is a dark, violent and very sexual animated movie, I cannot stress this fact enough, this movie is not for children, this is a movie strictly for adults. Don't let the fact that this movie is about cats fool you, it is not for kids. However, should this movie get a more official widespread release? And is it worth seeing as an adult?

Felidae is based on a book, by Akif Pirinçci, which I have not read, and is about a cat named Francis who investigates a series of feline murders that happen around his new home with an old and deformed cat named Bluebeard. This investigation leads Francis to a cult, gives him strange dreams, and leads him down to meeting a small cast of colourful cats and finding weird and twisted locations. This is a crime mystery through and through, and it has a lot of the tropes you would expect in a crime thriller, the red herrings, the surprise murder, the twist reveal, it's all here, and I think it is all executed very well. To be honest, I'm not a big consumer of mystery media, I have seen a few crime mysteries like The Usual Suspects, but the only other animated one I watched was Sherlock Gnomes, which I should not have to tell you was bad. However I think it is a good comparison here, because after that movies first reveal, I guessed there would be a second one. I think the key difference here is that, Sherlock Gnomes expected us to be fooled by what are common tropes and clichés that lots of animated movies use, whereas Felidae... well not being a movie for kids definitely gives it a lot more wiggle room.

Yeah, it is time to address the big part of this movie, the violence, blood and sexual references. Is it too much? The problem with answering this question is that, "too much" is a very loose amount that varies from person to person. A cup of liquid is too much for a shot glass, but not enough for a milk jug, and when it comes to art and media, sometimes we're shot glasses, and sometimes we're milk jugs. What we can and cannot tolerate will depend on many factors, including how the material is presented. For example, if "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was not humourous or tongue-in-cheek about topics like the purpose of existence and the nature of the universe, I don't think it would be one of my favourite books, and Felidae takes the deaths and dismemberments seriously, it's not really "Let's look at these bodies to make the viewers uncomfortable", it's more "If we're gonna pull this off, we need to show the bodies".

I do want to make it clear, if blood and gore, animal cruelty and conversations about sex do make you uncomfortable, there is no problem with giving this movie a pass. Cats get electrocuted, cut open, experimented on, burned with acid, and disemboweled all on screen, and we see the body of a decapitated cat in this movie too. Personally, I think this movie went as far as it needed to, but even then that may be too far for some. This is a good point to reiterate that this is not a movie for kids, and again, if some of these topics sound too much for you, I won't blame you if you decide to skip it.

The characters in this movie are interesting. Francis is a good protagonist, determined to solve the case, but he is not a hard ass or grizzled, he still cracks jokes with Bluebeard, who is the more grizzled of the two, but still has his friendlier and dumber moments. Throughout the movie, I was as invested in the mystery as Francis was, and I laughed with him and Bluebeard when they took playful jabs at each other. I will say, the voice acting was not particularly great, I watched an English dub that was uploaded to YouTube in 2013, which I'm assuming is an official dub. It sounded professional enough, but it's very bland in a lot of places, like they were recording for an audiobook.

That leads me nicely into the technicals of the movie. The rest of the sound is fairly good, the score is nice and does its job well. A lot of the sound mixing is really good though, there was a scene where Francis is escaping some cats chasing him, and during a fall his claws scratch a metal pipe and the sound just made me wince, but it a good way. The animation on the other hand, very nice. Apparently the animation was outsourced to about ten different studios, if you really pay attention you could probably tell what scenes were done by different studios, there was one dream sequence that was marvelously done in a much different style to the rest of the movie, with a lot of linear detail and some odd fade effect between the movement it was really well done. Apparently that scene was done by the main animation studio TFC Trickompany. I will say, I noticed some objects that, if they weren't CG I would be surprised, because this was the era that animated movies began to incorporate more CG into their style, but even then the rest of the movie is very well drawn and animated.

Felidae is a weird movie to really rate. On the one hand, I quite liked it. I enjoyed the lead character, I was invested in the mystery, it was exciting and thrilling, well made all around. On the other hand, the content and subject matter may be a bit much for some viewers. I do have to consider stuff like this, because I rank these movies by how I would recommend them, and typically a movie I have to put an asterisk next to would fall into the "Slight Recommendation" category. However, I want to stress that this is the kind of movie I want to see more of in animation, one that is strictly for adults, and not in the South Park or Simpsons movie sense. This is a kind of adult animated movie I don't think I've seen anything like, a story that would be very different if told in live action. Goodness, imagine is this was done in the style of the Cats Broadway show, that would be hilarious. Anyway, overall, I want to see more movies like this in animation, however, I do have to concede that when I recommend this movie, I am always going to have to say "But..." when doing so. "Oh yeah, this movie is good, but...", "I quite enjoyed it, but..." it's not a movie I can whole heartedly recommend. It's not great, but if it sounds like something you can stomach, go for it, and if it sounds too much for you, that's understandable too.

Editorial: About the Academy Awards

 

Well, this month has been rather quiet in the face of animated releases, other than a few trailers and announcements, so let's do another editorial. This time, I wanted to talk about something that I felt very strongly about, had a deep passion for and could talk about for hours, but instead I figured it would be more pertinent to talk about the Oscars.

What are the Oscars? Not in the literal sense, in the sense of "What do they mean"? Like the question "What is Love?" or "What is the meaning of life?" we aren't asking those questions in the literal sense of the question, I mean we know that love is a feeling and life has a dictionary definition, but in the more meta sense of it all, what really IS love, and does life have a true purpose? In the literal sense, the Oscars, or the Academy Awards are film industry awards given for artistic and technical merit given out every year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and are widely perceived as a very prestigious award. These awards are given by category including "Best Picture", "Best Costume Design", "Best Film Editing", "Best Actor", "Best Documentary Feature" and so on and so forth. These awards have been given out since the late 20s and are still a highly discussed and anticipated event to this day. That is what the Oscars are in the literal sense of the question, but what are they beyond the literal meaning?

Are the Oscars really a prestigious award? Is it all just a marketing gimmick? Is it just a bunch of film people patting themselves on the back? In my opinion, the Oscars are nothing, not even a joke. Jokes mean something, I don't think that the Oscars mean anything.

Like, let's be real here, do any of us actually watch a movie because the Oscars nominated it? Is our enjoyment of a movie lessened because it didn't win an award? Let's be real here, most of us only care about the awards because we want to advertise our favourite movies, it's award season where everybody says "Hey X Movie is an academy award nominee, go check it out" or it's after award season where everybody goes "hey, X Movie won the Academy Award for Y, go check it out!" and I'm fine with that, I really am, I mean a large part of why I am doing this blog is essentially to tell people to watch the movies that I like, or at the very least it is a nice bonus. However, I do think we need to stop pretending like the awards actually do mean anything.

Let's take the "Best Picture" award for example. Tell me, have you ever heard of "Cavalcade" from 1933? How about "The Great Ziegfeld" from 1936? "Marty" from 1955? "Tom Jones" from 1963? "Ordinary People" from 1980? I mean, you might have if you're a serious film buff, or you're a serious watcher of every Oscar winning movie, because all of those movies not only got nominated, but won the award. You know what movie was not nominated for the "Best Picture" award? "Back to the Future", one of the most iconic and beloved movies of the 1980s, but apparently "Hannah and Her Sisters", "Prizzi's Honor" and "Tender Mercies" are the movies that are going to be remembered forever. Yes, I know that it is tough to predict what will be remembered and what will not, but it really does surprise me that "Out of Africa" was the best movie of 1985, when that year gave us "Brazil", "Weird Science", "The Goonies", "Clue" and "Back to the Future".

Sometimes absolutely awful movies also get nominated, screw "Dead Poets Society", I hate that movie, and I refuse to watch "Rain Man" on principle. Also, "The Godfather Part III"? To be fair, the "Best Picture" winner of 1990 was "Dances with Wolves", which is hilarious to me as a fan of "The Red Green Show". Does anybody even care about "Shakespeare in Love" anymore? Granted my favourite movie of all time is an Academy Award Best Picture Winner, 2010's "The King's Speech", but it isn't my favourite movie because of its award status, honestly I'm surprised it won at all considering 2010 also saw "Black Swan", "Inception" and "True Grit" nominated. Really, that point is moot when you take into consideration that only two of my favourite movies were even nominated for "Best Picture", and only one of them won. "The Shawshank Redemption" lost to "Forrest Gump".

Oh, but you really, REALLY want to talk about pointless, let's talk about the Oscars and animated movies. So far, only three animated movies have been nominated for "Best Picture", "Beauty and the Beast", "Up" and "Toy Story 3", all deserving movies definitely, but that's it? Not "The Lion King"? or "Spirted Away"? or "Waltz with Bashir"? No, these movies, if they get nominated at all, get to be nominated for "Best Animated Feature". Since 2001, the Academy Awards have included a "Best Animated" Feature category, and granted this one generally has less to gripe about, however, the amount of animated features released that could be nominated for the award is not that much compared to live-action movies. This can and has lead to films like "Puss in Boots", "Shark Tale" and "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius" being nominated for the award, because... why? No really, why? Like, why "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius"? Was 2001 really lacking in animated releases? Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (A god awful movie but it could have easily fit in with the typical Oscar selections), Waking Life, but nope, Jimmy Neutron was the one that needed to be nominated.

Granted the Academy does nominate some lesser known animated movies, like in 2003 they nominated "The Triplets of Belleville", 2007 they nominated "Persepolis" and 2016 they nominated both "My Life as a Zucchini" and "The Red Turtle", so that does give these movies some good exposure to people who would otherwise pass them over, but a lot of people often feel like this category is just lip-service to the medium.

Really, I don't see why anyone should care about the Academy Awards. A lot of the movies that won the biggest award, "Best Picture", are not movies we remember, and the movies that weren't even nominated are movies that everyone remembers and usually loves. It's like that joke about Pitchfork, you can tell an album is good when Pitchfork gives it a 6/10, but you can tell an album is great when Pitchfork gives it a 2/10. It's like that, because so many of the movies that have become pop culture staples, they usually did not get nominated for "Best Picture", seriously, go through the list and see which award winners you've even heard of. Really, that is the big thing about the Academy Awards, they don't mean anything because they're not meant to mean anything. The Academy does not make a movie a timeless classic, time does, and what movies are considered "timeless classics" can change with time, people were saying "Avatar" was going to be one of the most beloved movies of all time, and yeah, it's still somewhat iconic, but the rate it's hype just died down, and "Avatar" didn't even win the 2009 "Best Picture" award, "The Hurt Locker" did. It just goes to show, fad truly is one letter away from fade.

Oh, and to all of you who are like "Oh, I don't care about the Oscars anyway", yeah, keep telling yourself that as you check to see if "Encanto" beat "Raya and the Last Dragon", or as you rant on Twitter if it looses, or celebrate if it wins. Yeah, you do care on some level, and on some level even I do, because I wrote this damn blog, but if you want an editorial about "Academy Award Nominees" or "Why X movie should have won the award instead of Y", sorry, you're not gonna get it out of me, because from this point on, I make zero plans to care about the Academy Awards.

DuckTales The Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp (1990) - A fun, if basic, movie based on a fun TV Series.

Last year I posted an editorial about the 2017 DuckTales reboot. Originally I wanted it to build up to this review, however, because I wanted to review Into The Spider-verse in December, and I normally take January off, the actual reveal that I was going to review this movie would have been really clunky. Still, DuckTales 2017 is one of my favourite TV Shows of all time, and the original 1987 series remains a fun, iconic, and significant piece of Animation History, being one of the kickstarts to the Disney Renaissance, which a lot of people forget was also a huge television thing as Disney was producing hit series after hit series around the same time in the Disney Afternoon. While DuckTales has aged, its impact cannot be overlooked, being one of the most beloved Disney cartoons, and having one of the most beloved licensed video games. Which makes it curious that not a lot of people really talk about the movie. Does that mean that the movie is the weakest entry in the DuckTales franchise?

Our favourite treasure hunting ducks find the lost treasure of Collie Baba, but an evil sorcerer steals the treasure and sends them to their supposed doom. However, because this is the Duck family, they survive and escape with a single oil lamp. Unfortunately, this is what the sorcerer, Merlock (Yes that did make me think of World of Warcraft a lot), was after, for this oil lamp contained a genie. So, Merlock and his henchman, Dijon, hunt down the lamp as Scrooge, the Nephews and Webby all make their own wishes. Plot wise, I don't think movie has a lot of surprises, you can probably guess that the henchman is gonna turn on the villain for his own selfish wishes, and the villain will get his hands on the McGuffin somehow, and do I even need to spoil what the Genie's arc is? Still, the plot wasn't sloppy, and it flowed very well. Much like Klaus, the plot is not bad, just predictable.

That being said, sometimes it is fun to watch characters you love going through a familiar plot, probably why so many of these movies based on TV shows are road trip movies... Anyway, these are the same characters we know and love from the original TV show, Scrooge and The Nephews and Webby and Launchpad and Mrs. Beakley. I do wish we got some cameos from other favourite characters, like Gizmoduck, Gyro Gearloose, and hey, the villain was an evil sorcerer, why couldn't we have Magica DeSpell here as well? To be fair, they do add the new characters of Genie, Dijon and Merlock. Dijon, who would in the reboot become Faris Djinn, is not the greatest character. In a post "Trouble with Apu" world I can see this character not sitting well with some viewers, as for me, he wasn't too bad, but I am not in much of a position to make a fair call. I think it might have been that he was not as bad as I thought he'd be, but when you imagine the worst, anything is an improvement. As for the other two, they were pretty fun. Genie is voiced by Rip Taylor, and that is as fun as it sounds. Merlock is voiced by Christopher Lloyd, and it is a Christopher Lloyd performance. He's one of those voices that immediately makes a great villain, up there with Vincent Price and Tim Curry. I will say that Merlock does have his dumb moments, like trying to press an elevator button as a cockroach, when he was alone. Still, he was a fun villain, but maybe not as good as Magica DeSpell or the Reboot's Flintheart Glomgold.

The technicals of the movie are really good, although Disney obviously handed this movie off to a smaller studio, DisneyMovie Toons to be exact, and it does not look as good as Disney's more cinematic movies. Honestly, it is kind of a shame, I would have loved to see this movie be given the same budget and time as something like The Little Mermaid or Rescuers Down Under, but looking at what we got, this movie still looks great. It was released theatrically, which does mean that the animation does have to look cleaner and of a higher quality, but I think it works well enough here, the characters don't look too clean or too well animated to throw anyone off. The music was done by David Newman, who worked with Disney before on Tim Burton's short film Frankenweenie, and also did the scores for The War of the Roses, The Brave Little Toaster and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. It was a pretty solid score done here, well enough that I might pick up the soundtrack if I happen to find a copy.

So with all that you may think the movie is fine, if a little generic, and yeah, it can be. However, the key to any adventure story is the adventure, and I think this movie was a fun and often somewhat intense adventure. The scene where Merlock is transforming Scrooge's money bin to an admittedly absurd evil fortress (seriously Bowser is not that extra) is a scene I actually have a vague memory of one moment from that sequence as a kid, and it being oddly terrifying to me, maybe it was the harsh reds and dark greys. Even then, when the movie is having a thrilling scene, it can be rather thrilling, I can imagine young children would really get into the more intense moments. Even when the movie is not having a thrilling moment and is just having a more mundane and slice-of-life moment, it's still a charming watch. I enjoyed watching the Nephews and Webby interact with Genie, I enjoyed watching Scrooge interact with Genie, I enjoyed these characters in this scenario.

DuckTales The Movie can be a bit of a predictable watch. I will not hide the fact, however, if you can look past that you will find an exciting adventure, charming characters and some wonderful animation and music. I can definitely say that I enjoyed this movie, so if you love DuckTales, love fun adventures, or just want a fun movie to kill an hour and a bit, I can say check this movie out. It's fun, charming and enjoyable, if a little bit predictable. A definite Recommendation from me!