As promised, I'm back with my Animation Advent Calendar for December leading up to the holidays! I bet you're all wondering where the hell this first movie on my list came from because to be perfectly honest, I had NEVER heard of this until Film Brain had put it on his worst list in his Review of 2015 Bad Movie Beatdown video. Given by morbid curiosity of it despite the 30 seconds of clips already proving it was going to be God awful, I decided to take a look at it for my Animation Advent Calendar. Directed by Eduardo Schuldt & animated by Aronnax Animation Studios, both of whom are mostly repsonsible for obscure low budget animated films (strangely all of which star Drake Bell). So with acting 'superstars' like Alicia Silverstone, Drake Bell & Ed Asner (because every Christmas & CGI film needs Ed Asner in it), will this be as sweet as the Land of Marzipan or is it as sickly as eating too much candy? Let's take a look!
Story: Like every single animated adaptation, this makes a few changes here & there. This case, however, it's for the worst. In both concept & execution, it's absolutely horrendous because it just has the most basic elements of the Nutcracker Story but doesn't add any depth into it, shifts in focus & cuts a lot of vital bits out. It feels like there was no sense of direction because the pacing is so inconsistent up to the point that the plot doesn't properly kick-start until about 40 minutes into this 80 minute movie & scenes feel like they're taking forever! What makes this worse is Fritz in the real world tags along for the adventure by being taken hostage by the Mouse King rather than letting the former take stride & leaving out all of the ambiguity. This in turn leaves nothing that important happening as it focuses on Marie & Fritz learning to love each other as siblings which is never interesting because we hardly get any development from them, neither characters are likeable & all it does is leave the titular Nutcracker Nathan to the sidelines (we'll get to them in a bit). It doesn't really help that the relationship between him, Marie & Princess Marmalade is very poorly done & there's no emotional involvement & we know absolutely nothing about the characters other than Nathan's backstory that's crowbarred in when they decide to pause the plot. And with the final battle...it's without a doubt one of the most anticlimactic battles I've ever seen because nothing ever proper happens, there's no build-up, the stakes are insultingly low & it takes up about a third of the running time & feels like it's plodding on for no reason other than to fill the 80 minute running time (10 minutes of which is devoted to the end credits). And by the way, for those expecting Tchaikovky's music in the soundtrack, it's only very briefly used. Instead, there's crappy pop Christmas music which only happens once 30 minutes into the movie never to be heard from again! Because that's what makes me think of The Nutcracker! This is such a banal, dreadful mess of a movie, I can actually say that Barbie in the Nutcracker was a better movie than this because it at least tried to have stakes & character development despite it's confusing changes!
Characters: With a messy story that this already is, don't expect any of the characters to be complex or interesting! Marie, (Alicia Silverstone doing an awful impression of how a little girl would sound) is just an annoying spoilt brat who doesn't do anything important, barely has any development other than the tacked on moral with her brother & is uninteresting. I never cared for her throughout & she's somehow worse than Barbie's version when she at least did stuff that mattered & had something called character development despite her blandness. Nathan the Nutcracker (Drake Bell doing an awful British accent) actually feels more like a side character due to the shift in focus & even with his backstory, being adopted by the toys, he still manages to be bland & uninteresting. The Owl narrator (Ed Asner) is solely there for exposition at the worst of times with Nathan's backstory & the origins of his rivalry with Lady Mouseling and comes out of nowhere to help Marie save her brother. Speaking of, Fritz is equally as irritating as his sister & he certainly fits into the annoying brother stereotype for the wrong reasons & is actually the plot device for Marie to save in the Land of Christmas Trees. Oh yeah, and the Mouse King feels like no threat at all because he barely appears, his motivation with his family is incredibly weak & his goons are that incompetent, I was confused as to how they became his minions in the first place! Oh yeah, and the great Princess Marmalade has absolutely no purpose or character whatsoever. The rest like Marie & Fritz's parents & Uncle Drosselmeyer barely appear and yet somehow manage to act like absolute idiots doing nothing but tack on the moral for Marie & Fritz! I don't even think I can call anyone in this a character. They feel more like scary dolls spewing out a load of random nonsense with awful voice acting.
Just when I thought the 2010 adaptation of The Nutcracker was the worst thing ever to come out of Tchaikovsky's classic ballet, this comes along to prove me very wrong! The Nutcracker Sweet is without a doubt the Christmas equivalent to Foodfight with an incompetent & lazily put together story missing the purpose of the original, scary & unfinished animation, stupid characters with insufferable voice acting to add insult to injury & not a shred of charm. Please, DO NOT watch this film unless you want your Christmas to be filled with nightmares of the most dead looking animated characters ever put on screen next to the Robert Zemeckis movies!
Story: 1/10
Animation: 2/10
Characters: 1/10
Overall: 1/10
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar