The Seventh Dwarf

Released back in 2014, this German made animated film was the final work for director by Harold Siepermann, an animator who helped work on various Disney projects like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Tarzan & Enchanted, before he sadly died of cancer. However, in a very interesting fact, this is actually the third film out of a trilogy of movies about the Seven Dwarves made back in 2004 & 2006 & is the first of the bunch to be animated. Even the actors who portrayed the dwarves in the live action films returned to voice their animated counterparts! And speaking of actors, the version I watched & shall be reviewing is the second English dub so Peyton List & Norm Macdonald don't voice Rose or Burner (not that it's gonna change my thoughts on the characters). So will this movie be able to be seven times the fun, or is it as insufferable as the seven deadly sins? Let's take a look!

Story: Right off the bat, I think anyone can already guess that this is trying to be something like Shrek with the set up of a fairytale crossover filled with anachronistic jokes & low brow humour. And you'd most definitely be right, except, like other Shrek rip-offs i.e. Happily N'Ever After, it doesn't do anything to make it stand out or bring any charm. Nothing in this can be considered original nor even interesting or funny because there is little to no focus! The story itself is your generic quest to save a cursed princess with wacky shenanigans along the way, but this time with the Seven Dwarves from Snow White helping kitchen boy Jack save his one true love Rose. It feels very predictable & by the book & throughout, I felt like the movie thought if it 'emulated' other fairytales to create Rose's story (a mix of Snow White & Sleeping Beauty with a curse being that she'll fall asleep for 100 years if she pricks her finger on ANYTHING before she turns 18. I'm sure there's an innuendo in there somewhere), then it would be 'original'. And as expected, it doesn't! The humour feels forced with its attempts at 'funny' slapstick, your typical low brow humor & the worst of the bunch, shoehorned references to pop culture & modern technology (including an incredibly obnoxious parody to YouTube of all things). And like mentioned before, this movie has little to no knowledge of who it wants to focus on, let alone what kind of movie it wants to be! Seriously, one minute it'll go into detail on Rose's story/curse via exposition narration, and then the next, it's all about Bobo the dwarf trying not to screw things up for everyone or Dellamorta cursing the kingdom! It doesn't really help that the stupid morals are condescendingly shoved in your face through pointless & lazily put together musical numbers & the pacing is so off that the incredibly slow anticlimactic token battle lasts about 10 minutes! And of course, the movie leaves little room to flesh out the characters, part of which made the aforementioned Shrek appealing in the first place despite the numerous pop culture & fairytale spoofs & has gaping plot holes which are not once acknowledged. It definitely qualifies as a poor man's Shrek like past attempts of the formula, and it's equally as cliched, obnoxious & bloated. I know I may not sound as angry as back when I reviewed Happily N'Ever After, but what else did you expect going into this?

Surprised that Youtube didn't file a lawsuit over this!

Animation: I think it's also clear from the pictures that the animation...isn't the best to say the least!  The character designs do attempt to make it like Disney except a little more cartoony (and generic) & it really doesn't work because there's no attention to detail put into the textures! Seriously, they all have uncanny valley dead eyes & some characters like Bobo look like something out of a Mr Tetley's Tea package or Jack looks more like a 12 year old kid than a guy in his late teens! And speaking of textures, both this & the effects like the magic, fire & various materials are very inconsistent from looking 'passable' to downright lazy. The character animation admittedly isn't that bad, but it can still look a bit too over the top & stiff for the type of characters they're trying to be. The backgrounds of Fantabularasa also rips off plenty of elements from better CGI movies up to the point that Dellamorta's ice palace looks uncannily similar to Elsa's ice palace. I will admit that the lighting & some of the locations do sort of help with the scale of the kingdom, but all of them come across as generic & bland. Another thing I would like to mention is that the movie does use 2D animation at the start for the movie as childish drawings to explain Rose's curse & it admittedly made the movie have a little promise (even if I already knew it was going to be bad & it still looks pretty bad). I'm not saying that it's the absolute worst CGI I've ever seen for an animated film, but it's still very...subpar by cinematic standards.

Characters: I know I wasn't as angry when talking about the story of this movie, but let me tell you that the characters make my blood boil with their stupidity & obnoxiousness! The dwarves (to be honest, I don't even remember their names except for the supposed main character Bobo) barely have personalities or chemistry with each other & are so boring that it made me scratch my head with why the movie wanted to focus on them. And like I mentioned, despite a lack of focus over who the movie is about, Bobo is given more 'development' thanks to his confusing arc about not being able to tie his shoelaces & fixing his mistake over causing Rose to be cursed. Oh yeah, and he's a walking disaster, I forgot to mention that! Princess Rose is my candidate for the absolute worst princess character ever invented! Other than being portrayed as sexist as a housewife from the 50s, she just acts like a dumb valley girl & can qualify more as a plot device due to her sleeping curse. She has no development, isn't interesting & is more than willing to let the love of her life save her rather than attempting to save herself or the kingdom. The villain, Dellamorta, is just a rip-off of infinitely better Disney villains with her 'motive' for cursing Rose being...she was in love with the king & he dumped her. Do they ever dive into their past & why he dumped her? Do they ever portray her as sympathetic or at the very least 2 dimensional? Do they squander the numerous possibilities with this character in favor of making her evil for just being evil & making her sound like a cross between Gollum & Harvey Fierstein except more annoying? Well, the answer to the last one is yes with no shame! Anyway, Jack, Rose's 'love interest' is just an absolute idiot without any redeeming qualities (or brain cells) because of his habit of not keeping his mouth shut in vital situations! The side characters are no better, either being Shrek rip-offs (including Puss in Boots' character design being 'borrowed' in this cameo) or one dimensional & equally as sexist like Snow White being an equally as dumb bimbo clad in a miniskirt who only appears in one scene or Red Riding Hood & the Big Bad Wolf as TV hosts with the sexual undertones of their original story being more glaringly obvious. And this is not dissimilar to rap artists Herman & Sherman who the dwarves meet in their quest & are just there to be 'comic relief' as racist stereotypes & are never seen again nor mentioned afterwards! Literally, the only character that can qualify as interesting is Burner (or Burnie), Dellamorta's dragon minion who really yearns to be a tap-dancer and ends up helping the dwarves & Jack in their quest to save Rose. But the downside to him is his arc is barely acknowledged & he does resort to being used for plot cliches and can have times of questionable intelligence. This is without a doubt the worst part of this movie because none of these characters are worth getting to know, let alone caring about or rooting for!

Seriously, even Kristen Stewart's Snow White in Snow White & the Huntsman was a better representation of the character!

Songs: Like mentioned before, this is a musical & they really are showstoppers...in that they stop the plot & make it feel like it's taking forever! None of them have any significance to the story nor the characters about who they are or how they're feeling about the situation going on.  I Not only that, but they're also very inconsistent with the genre ranging from Disney-esque Broadway (except incredibly lazy both in quality & execution) or modern pop to be 'fo sheezy hip dog!' or rap! Anyway, the first one is just about the dwarves baking a cake for Princess Rose's birthday which serves no purpose after Bobo destroys it & is easily forgiven. The second is an obnoxious pop song during Rose's birthday party used as ear bleeding background noise, the third is the generic villain's song with Dellamorta just spouting out her motive in the slowest & most obvious way possible without diving into her relationship with the king. The fourth is an obnoxious rap number by Herman & Sherman which is also pointless & shoved down our throats, the fifth one is just a song all about friendship being good as an apology to Bernie from Bobo to stop him from committing suicide (yes, really) which just obnoxiously talks down to the audience about the moral and the last one is the most obvious attempt at a Disney-esque love song (as well as the leitmotif of the movie) which is just banal & boring. I can't even be bothered going into the end credits songs because one is just repetitive with lyrics pretty much saying that being short is good sung by Dellamorta's voice actress! All of these songs feel as artificial as the rest of this & are without a doubt the cherry on the top for how dull & banal this movie really is.

So...what was the point of this movie? The Seventh Dwarf feels like something that was shelved about 10 years ago & put back into production to cash in on much popular CGI fairytale movies. The writing is lazy with no focus, the animation may not be the worst CGI I've ever seen yet is very inconsistent, the characters are all one dimensional with little to no common sense & the songs just feel like they were added in at the last minute. I'm not even sure who I can recommend this for because I think even children will be bored by this like I was (seriously, I cared more about making my lunch when I was watching this & nearly fell asleep) & they should just stick to the much better & smarter movies that have been out recently. While it may work as its own stand-alone movie compared to it's live action predecessors & is admittedly a tad less insufferable to watch as Happily N'Ever After, that still really doesn't make it worth watching.
Story: 2/10
Animation: 4/10
Characters: 1/10
Songs: 2/10
Overall: 2/10