BEFORE: I"m back on animation tonight - this should all make sense in a couple of days, I know I probably say that a lot. The truth is that January's roster often doesn't make sense at all, it's been a mix of different styles, dramas and comedies, documentaries and biopics, romances and action films living side-by-side, because it's all about getting from Point A - that perhaps obscure Norwegian film - to Point B, which is the start of the romance chain. So I've gone down some weird little roads to connect those two points, a spy thriller and a horse-racing film, a tense space thriller and a quirky game-show comedy, all to connect two otherwise random films in 30 (OK, 32) steps. But that's the game, can it be done? Of course it can, it's just not always going to make perfect sense from day to day.
Brendan Fraser carries over from "The Whale".
THE PLOT: The legendary sailor helps a beautiful princess save her father and their seaside kingdom from the clutches of an Evil Wizard.
AFTER: Man, I don't say this very much, but I wish I had not watched this film. Ugh, it's terrible, just look at that poster art, it's bloody awful. Somebody drew that and then looked at it and thought, "Yeah, that looks good...Well good enough, anyway..." NO, NO, not at all, that looks incredibly awful! If the animation here looked like THAT I suppose it would be OK, but it doesn't look like that, it's not cel animation, but CGI - and CGI from the year 2000, when the medium was just out of its infancy, it seems. This looks like BAD CGI that you might expect to find in a college student's portfolio, but you can make allowances for that, because a college student would probably be using a cheap-ass PC and doing the best they could.
No, some production companies in India spent MILLIONS making this film, and it looks far worse than what a college student TODAY could make on their PC for practically nothing. What a complete waste of time and effort. My guess is that this film ruined the Indian animation industry (aka IndiAnimation?) and then jobs went over to make PakistAnimation or AfghanistAnimation. The terrible idea here is called "motion capture", and it ruined the whole enterprise here, or at least took this shitty story and made it look shitty to match.
Nothing really works here, the simple act of a character throwing a rock at a giant spider, for example, looks nothing like how somebody throws a rock in the real world. But isn't motion capture supposed to replicate a human's real movements? So why then does that look so bad, why does everything look so bad? People look like they have arms made of rubber that are bulging the wrong places, like the animators have no idea how human anatomy is supposed to look. Is that bad programming or just bad art? Then I swear there were some parts where there was space between characters beards and their faces, like you're just not supposed to see space in-between, that's not how beards work.
Also, this is not how anything works, if you strike a tree branch with a sword, it's not going to catch on fire so it can be used like a torch. Nope, that's not a thing. There's a reason why this film is not streaming anywhere right now, because it's just terrible. Also, it made only $29,000 when it was released in the U.S. - people stayed away in droves, and rightfully so. I need to move on and watch another movie as quickly as possible, just to wipe the memory of this one from my brain ASAP.
To be fair, I came home late last night - technically, this morning at 2 am, after working at the NY VideoGame Awards. Maybe I wasn't in a good frame of mind, maybe I should have gone right to sleep instead of watching a movie, but no, I think it was the movie, not me, it's just terrible all around. The one positive thing I can say about it is the voice-work, they actually suckered a few notable names to do the voices, and so this has cast members from both "Star Trek" and "Star Wars", then one from "Indiana Jones" movies and a couple more pros from the cartoon world, in addition to Brendan Fraser. I'll give 2 points for the casting and voice-work, but nothing for story, design, animation or entertainment value. That's it, I'm being tough but I think also fair.
The synopsis on IMDB is filled with errors, it says "The motion capture effect is a cartoon with a human look." Umm, no, it's not. "Facial expressions are lifelike; gestures are fluid." No, and also no. "Computer-generated scenes are rich in color, depth and realism." Nope, nope and nope, also that's extremely contradictory, it can't be both a cartoon and realistic at the same time, that's impossible. Then, worst of all - "Those familiar with the Sinbad films featuring the effects of Ray Harryhausen will be dazzled by this newcomer." Not on your best day, motion capture. Ray Harryhausen died in 2013 and I bet he could STILL animate better than this despite that fact.
If you really want to turn a $30 million budget into $30,000 of box office receipts, be my guest but at least try to be entertaining along this way, instead of making 85 minutes of pure failure.
Also starring the voices of John Rhys-Davies (last seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"), Jennifer Hale (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Leonard Nimoy (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Mark Hamill (last seen in "De Palma"), Robert Allen Mukes, Harry Zinn, K.W. Miller, Allan Lurie, Jim Cummings (last heard in "Space Jam: A New Legacy"), Nick Jameson, Kevin Michael Richardson (last heard in "Minions: The Rise of Gru").
RATING: 2 out of 10 flying mushrooms (I assume somebody was high on mushrooms when they conceived this story...)
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