BEFORE: All right, this film has been on my list for much, much, too long. I can't say for sure if it was on the original watchlist when I started this blog in 2009, but, you know, it's possible. I watched the first "Happily N'ever After" film in 2010, so that's 16 years ago, and it's taken me THAT long to link to the sequel - because none of the voice actors from that original film saw fit to appear in the sequel, they must have known it was going to be terrible. Or maybe there was no budget to get any of those actors to come back? Who knows? I'm just happy to finally be able to cross this one off the list, it's only 75 minutes long so even if it's unbearably stupid or corny, I can endure 75 minutes of it to open up a slot on my watchlist.
David Lodge carries over from "Swapped". I could have snuck this one in between two movies in the "Purge" franchise, because one of the voice actors provided the voice for the broadcast system announcements in those movies, but then that would have caused thematic whiplash, I think.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Happily N'ever After" (Movie #444)
THE PLOT: Fairy tales collide when Mambo and Munk tip the scales of good and evil once again. This time, Princess Snow White is a misguided teenager who'd rather have fun with her friends Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and Little Bo Peep than help peasants.
AFTER: Now I'm wondering if the Chain was trying to protect me, all this time, for the last 16 years, because this really is one of the worst animated films I've ever seen. Beyond that, it's one of the worst films of ANY genre that I've seen. But it's gone now, it can't hurt me any more.
I have to imagine that some other studio was trying to jump on the "Shrek" bandwagon, mashing up different fairy tales together, this would have been released between "Shrek the Third" and "Shrek Forever After", but who knows, maybe they started production after the second "Shrek". Still, that might be giving it too much credit, because this really looks and feels like it was thrown together and animated on somebody's Commodore 64 personal computer. I mean, we have AI now and the Instagram is filled with "A.I. Slop", all of which looks better than this does. I mean, you can just type the name of a character into an A.I. engine now and in a few seconds you'll have footage of that character doing anything you want. ANYTHING.
Somebody (or a lot of somebodies) had to WORK to make a film this bad back in 2009 - the animation is horrible CGI, there's no attempt at proper lip-synch so you kind of have to infer which character is saying what at any given time. Notice that there's almost always one male character talking to one female character, then through the audio clues of lower voices and higher voices you can (sort of) determine who's saying what. But it's still difficult to follow and even harder to justify.
Some of the actors use different names when they work on different animated projects, like acclaimed voice-over artist Keith Ferguson used the name "Jim Sullivan" in the credits here, I've got Wikipedia telling me that those names are used by the same actor, which is going to allow me to link to tomorrow's film. For a while I thought, maybe he's under exclusive contract to Disney or Warner Bros. and if he wants to do other projects outside of that company, he's got to use a pseudonym - but now I think it's because this film is so BAD that he doesn't really want anyone to know he worked on it. For sure it's not on his reel or his resume that he hands out.
Ugh, let's get into it and then I'll be done with it. Snow White here is portrayed as a reckless teenager, she's always shirking her Princess duties and going "clubbing" with her friends - Goldilocks, Red Riding Hood and Little Bo Peep. These girls are collectively multi-racial and say "Holla!" a lot, that should give you an idea about when it was made. The dance club they go to also has a jousting match, sure, because it's Medieval Times - but Snow White has a cell phone! And when she bites the apple, the spell causes her to say terrible things about her friends on social media, which is a network of crystal balls or something - that's very stupid. Why not just remake "Mean Girls" but with fairy tale princesses, that would be a better idea than this.
Snow White's mother also dies early in the picture, so when the king realizes that Snow is out of control with the clubbing and the social media, he figures he'll get married again so she'll have a mother to teach her how to be a better, more giving woman. Umm, NITPICK POINT, why can't HE teach her that? Oh, right, because she's "Daddy's Little Girl" and he can't seem to discipline her in any way. It happens. But this is a chance for "Lady Vain" to get Rumpelstiltskin and the Magic Mirror to cast a spell so she looks EXACTLY like Snow White's dead mother. Right, because that won't seem suspicious at all.
When the King sends his man-servant to the Fairy Godmother's dating service to start the search for his wife, the F.G. looks high and low and, of course, stumbles on the dead queen's exact double, and then it's not long before the marriage is scheduled, and Snow White, she doesn't take it well. This is what drives her to the forest to the home of the Seven Dwarves, she lets herself in and falls asleep in their beds. Geez, for a second I thought she was in the home of the Three Bears and they got her story confused with Goldilocks'. When the dwarves tell her that her mother used to live with them (kinky, I did it...) they decide to make her stay and they teach her to do good deeds, like rebuild the houses of the Three Little Pigs and babysit for the Old Woman Who Lives in a Shoe. Well, she DID have so many children, she didn't know what to do, but with Snow White's help, she has time to go to the spa and get a make-over!
The worst part of the film is how the characters Mambo and Munk carry over from the previous film, voiced by new actors because nobody wanted to return to this franchise, and their presence in the story makes no sense. They're "somewhere else" and they've got this big scale that they can't control, and somehow it tips fate toward either good or evil - but umm, where are they, and how does their scale affect the good or bad things that happen to Snow White? We already have the Magic Mirror, do we really need the Magic Scale in the story, too? Nope. But we have it.
Somebody has to go out to the forest and find Snow White, before her father makes the big mistake of marrying Lady Vain, who will ruin the kingdom and probably kill the king once she becomes queen. Sir Peter, one of the king's bodyguards, finds her running a Help Center in the forest and they travel back to stop the wedding, just in time of course. The only way she can convince her father that she's changed and he doesn't have to get married is by apologizing for all the rude things she said about her friends, which she should have done ANYWAY, not just to stop the wedding. Lady Vain does not take this well and attacks Snow White, but her attack is reflected by the Magic Mirror, and it bounces back, removing her illusion spell and everyone can now see she's not as beautiful as the former queen. Ah, tough break, but she would have gotten away with it if not for those meddling dwarves...
The story is simplistic, it feels like it was written by a child, and as I said before, it looks terrible, as if it was made when computer animation was in the infancy stage. Well, it kinda was, except we already had "Shrek" and "Toy Story" movies which look a hundred times better.
Directed by Steven E. Gordon & Boyd Kirkland
Also starring the voices of Gina K. Bowes, Cam Clarke (last heard in "Lego Batman: The Movie - DC Super Heroes Unite), Doug Erholtz, Jennie Fahn (last seen in "Gloria Bell"), Keith Ferguson (credited as Jim Sullivan) (last heard in "The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie"), Kate Higgins (last seen in "Hotel Artemis"), Helen Niedwick, Lex Lang (last heard in "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2"), Christine Lakin (credited as Catherine Lavine) (last seen in "Georgia Rule"), Cindy Robinson (last heard in "The Forever Purge"), Doug Stone, Kirk Thornton,
RATING: 2 out of 10 pieces of Humpty Dumpty
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