Shemaroo, Shemaroo, Say It With Me, It's Like A Mantra

Imagine that you are a filmmaker from South America or Central Asia with a nice cheap little movie you've just finished making. You've had a minor theatrical release but just haven't made quite enough money off of it.  What do you do with it now? Well, if there happens to be a movie topping the box office in North America that has a similar theme (or you can fake it well enough), you slap a copyright-defying cover on a cheap DVD and sell it to the stupid, the unobservant and the chronically stoned.

Welcome to the sordid world of the Mockbuster, a surprisingly lucrative industry.  Trust me, if a movie has made money in the decades since the home video market exploded, someone has made a cheap rip-off of it somewhere.

The Mockbuster we are here to discuss is Kiara the Brave, which started life at Shemaroo Entertainment (which is really fun to say, by the way) in 2011 as Super K, a Last Airbender ripoff. When The Last Airbender tanked worldwide and was generally regarded as one of the worst things ever, Super K seemed doomed to die in obscurity in India.  That is, until 2012, when another movie, this one featuring a redheaded princess in a green dress, exploded out of everybody's favourite animation studio, Pixar. The brain trust behind Shemaroo quickly realized, "hey, we have a redheaded princess in a green dress in our movie!" A quick title change and some deceiving cover art to transform an irritating side character into the main character, and now you have a Brave Mockbuster.

And oh my God, you guys, it's the best.  By which I mean it's the absolute worst, a hideous, dumb, plodding thing of absolutely no merit whatsoever.  But unlike Pup, which was hideous, dumb and brain-leakingly boring, Kiara the Brave is the kids' movie equivalent of a System Of A Down album - inept and jarring, and yet endlessly fascinating and entertaining because of it.  It is, without a doubt, So Bad It's Good, and while I would never recommend it for children, a group of adults with something mind-bending on hand would get such a kick out of it.

It is the story of Dreamzone, a planet hidden from Earth where all the Clouds live. Ruled by the good King Maximus, who we first meet at his coronation atop a massive tower several hundred miles away from where the approximately seventeen citizens of Dreamzone are cheering for him, Dreamzone is, apparantly, the Perfect World.  Unfortunately Maximus' brother, Dreadmas, is plotting his downfall, and seriously, what are royal parents thinking when they name their kids? "You will be Maximus, the good king, and if we have a second son we'll name him something that will guarantee he'll turn evil and try to take the throne from you in fifty years."

Anyway, Dreadmas' plan, given him by Destiny, a shapeshifting all-powerful being who apparently delights in toying with mortals despite being, to all appearances, the avatar of good, is to use a very complicated formula involving bats' wings, pasta and the blood of Dracula (who appears for like a millisecond and never returns) to create a Super Kloud, capable of controlling all of the elements, and therefore destroy King Maximus.  Unfortunately his two inept demon sidekicks, Accidentally and Suddenly, who don't even get a decent "Who's on First" moment to excuse their names, screw up the formula.  So what comes out of the cauldron isn't the all-powerful agent of destruction Dreadmas had hoped for, but an adorable (supposedly, it's hard to tell when everybody looks this creepy) baby who shoots lightning.  Dreadmas orders his two idiot demons to kill the child, but Super Kloud's inexplicable ability to vomit gemstones makes the greedy creatures decide to hide him and raise him themselves, hoping to become rich.

Super Kloud grows into an adolescent in like a day, and so he's sent off to school, where his inability to control his invincible powers over the elements gets him expelled, instead of, like, taught how to control his powers over the elements, which is what a school for weather-people ought to do.  Despondent, he wanders off, right into the Black Hole, a sort of grey sort of hole guarded over by two serpents who sing a half-Gregorian chant, half hip-hop ode to "dung sauce" - I'm not kidding - before trying to eat him.  He's rescued by Mesmerizer, the King's Gandalf-like advisor, who does nothing but stroke his beard awkwardly and invite Kloud to play with his "many gadgets" that all look like 1980s electronics, before going "Universe-surfing" over to visit Maximus.

All of this is in the first fifteen minutes of the movie, and you'll notice that nobody named Kiara has shown up yet.

Kiara turns out to be Maximus' daughter, a psychotic creepy monster with empty, terrifying eyes who admonishes her father for not making her excited every damn second. But she has red hair and a green dress, so there you go. Her birthday party is very much improved, she thinks, when Super Kloud comes tumbling out of Mesmerizer's ponytail somehow, and proceeds to take everyone's advice to "chill" literally, dropping golfball-sized globs of ice on the castle. The princess and the boy become fast friends, and must band together a team of kids ("kid power" is mentioned several times, and you haven't lived until you've heard the grave, trying-to-be Gandalf voice of the sagelike Mesmerizer proclaim "they're trying to draw you away from your Kid Power, Super Kloud!)  to stop Dreadmas and his even more evil accomplice, Dr. Ozox, who apparently rules pollution, from taking over Dreamzone.

Did I mention that all of these proceedings are watched over and narrated by the Planets Of The Solar System, here represented as grotesque disembodied heads with marvellous moustaches? Or that Destiny's Child keeps showing up, a cranky little boy who can't decide who he should be and so he keeps dressing up as pop culture figures like Spiderman, Jack Sparrow, Harry Potter and... one of the guys from Jersey Shore? and never once decides to be Beyonce?

Nothing in this movie is linear. Nothing progresses naturally from one scene to the next.  It seems making things coherent was too difficult for Shemaroo, who opt to replace story with baffling incoherence and logic with just being batshit insane. At one point Dr. Ozox, who turns out to be the real villain in this piece, has Super Kloud and princess Kiara trapped in his evil lair, and he... just sends them home? Because the very next scene is Super Kloud and Kiara inciting the hideous troglodyte children into a revolt while Dreamzone's towers belch polluting black smoke into the air.

Words can't describe how ugly this movie is.  Everybody's face looks like they were slathered in margarine and then lit from below by a flashlight held far too close to their face, fight scenes happen in slow motion not by choice but because nobody knew how to animate bodies coming in contact with one another, and no two objects actually touch.  Meanwhile, everybody speaks dreeeaddfuuulllyy slowly to accommodate their lines into the terrible animation, and the soundtrack is nothing but public-domain polka and calliope music, tastefully muted in the hope that you won't actually notice the soundtrack is nothing but polka and calliope music.  It's truly a dreadful, dreadful movie, and you totally have to watch it.

Story: What story? Events are strung together like they wrote plot points from eight different movies on little strips of paper and then flung them into the air. 0 Points
Execution: Laughable. 0 Points
Moral: Oh God. FOLLOW YOUR DESTINY, SUPER KLOUD! And don't pollute, I guess, because polluting turns clouds into zombies or something. 0 Points
Songs: There's just the one Dung Sauce song, but then again, that's the Dung Sauce song.  Also the end credits have a really terrific "Super Kloud" theme song that's just the worst, with lines like

You can call me magic

Trouble someone tragic

Simply fantastic

Super K is what I am

0 Points

Did My Kids Like It? I told you, this isn't for kids.  This is for grown-ups who have been chemically conditioned to enjoy it.

Score: 0/4, but oh my God, is it great.

Bonus Post: The Terrifying Totalitarian World Of Disney: Descendants

I have a problem.  It's not really a problem for me, and it's not really a problem for anybody else, either, but "I have a problem with reading too much into kids' shows" sounds a lot better than "I spend a great deal of time thinking about the inner world of kids' shows and trying to figure out how they work".  I have stayed up late wondering, where are Max and Ruby's parents?  Is Mike the Knight actually a prequel to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves?  What exactly was Sir Topham Hatt thinking when he created an army of steam locomotives with artificial intelligence and the emotional maturity of preschoolers?  It's a lot of fun if you ever want to try it, and if you're a parent of young children it's a great game to play with yourself to increase your enjoyment of the programs that are going to spend much more time on your screen than Orange is the New Black.

With this in mind, let me turn my overactive imagination to the world of Disney: Descendants.  Because there is something very wicked in the Kingdom of Auradon.

I may have brought up the subject briefly in my review, but there is a legitimately universe-breaking problem with Cruella De Vil's inclusion among the villains on the Isle of the Lost.  See if you can find it with me.  The core four villains are: Cruella, Maleficent, Jafar and Evil Queen. Ignoring the seething rage I still get over the fact that Evil Queen is not her effing name, there's a real one-of-these-things-just-doesn't-belong-here vibe with these four.  Maleficent, an all-powerful sorceress and queen of the fairies, laid a deadly curse on a royal princess.  Jafar, an all-powerful sorcerer and occasional genie, attempted a violent coup on the kingdom of Agrabah, attempted regicide and imprisoned and enslaved the crown princess.  Evil Queen, as the... evil queen and stepmother of crown princess Snow White, ordered her murder and then attempted to finish off the job herself, and not at all because she was the rightful heir, but because she was prettier.  All three conspired to harm a royal person or persons.  All three are magic users and legitimate enemies of the state for a magical, fairy-tale kingdom.

Cruella, on the other hand.... what did she do wrong? Besides legitimately purchase seventy-four dalmatian puppies?  She kidnapped fifteen dogs.  That's her entire crime.  Planning to kill and skin them is pretty awful, but I'm pretty sure there weren't animal cruelty laws in England in the 1920s, and even if there were, Attempted Animal Abuse is still not a crime.

So we have here a mortal, with no magical powers, whose entire career of villainy was committed against one family of dogs.  Dogs who, in their own movie at least, were incapable of communicating to their owners except in the normal way dogs always have. Which means that even though the dogs' owners may suspect that Cruella was behind their pets' disappearance and harbour that suspicion until the end of their days, there's still no way of proving it.  And yet Cruella winds up shunted off to the Isle of the Lost, a combination prison camp and ghetto, for the crime of alleged dognapping. Without benefit of either criminal charges or conviction, Beast's cartoon gestapo rounded her up with all the other ne'er-do-wells.

If that's the case, then just what does it take to be classified a villain and dropped into permanent exile? There are thousands of people on the Isle of the Lost - whole families, even - and only a fraction of them have any connection to any Disney villain.  What were their crimes? Mail fraud? Tearing the tag off the mattress? 

How about dissent?

We are told that Beast and Belle united the kingdoms into the overkingdom of Auradon twenty years ago (instead of going on a honeymoon, which would likely have been much healthier). You don't just up and decide to unite a dozen sovereign states by yourself.  There had to be some loyalists around who weren't pleased with the thought.  I would imagine that those dissenters make up a good portion of the population of the Isle.  Entire families, women and children and even babies, shunted off to an off coast slum and forgotten about forever, left at the mercy of a new ruling class of power-mad, pissed off sorcerers.  In other words, the United States of Auradon is a terrifying Orwellian nightmare-state.

It really puts a different spin on the whole "Choose Good" moral of the movie, when "I choose Good!" really means "I choose continued acceptance and fraternization with the totalitarian overlords who would willingly exile me again the second I opposed them!" It also, technically, makes Maleficent less of a villain and more of a revolutionary.

And all because they decided to include Cruella De Vil in their Rogues Gallery, a villain who is one of the hands-down favourites for best-animated villain in any of the Disney movies, but who in no other way fits in with their milieu.  They would have been much better off going with Ursula's kid instead.

Mirror Mirror On The Wall

If, as a hack screenwriter working in the back rooms of Disney's TV department, not renowned for their high art, I was offered the premise of "Let's do some kind of a sitcom thing with the famous Disney villains... I don't know, maybe their kids or something", I think I could come up with probably  a dozen different scenarios better than Disney: Descendants.  Just in the few days since I listened to the movie three times on a road trip and then watched it myself for clarification, I've come up with at least two:

-The children of Disney Villains uncover an even more villainous plot than their parents could ever come up with to destroy all fairy tale life and have to team up to stop it (Disney Villain Suicide Squad), or

-The children of Disney Villains find themselves magically warped into a far future where Fairy Godmother, having used her "Happy Endings" to rid the world of all other magic users, has established herself as an all-powerful dictator (Disney Villain Samurai Jack).

Instead, writers Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott and director Kenny Ortega give us... the children of Disney Villains are sent to a... prep school where they learn to not be evil through friendship and team sports. Really? Okay, really.

The broad strokes are these: in the years since Belle and Beast were married, all the Disney kingdoms have been united into the kingdom of Auradon, with Beast (Dan Payne) as Overking.  The villains, meanwhile, like Maleficent (Kristen Chenoweth), Evil Queen (Kathy Najimy), Jafar (Maz Jobrani) and Cruella De Vil (Wendy Raquel Robinson) have been banished to the prison colony of the Isle of the Lost, where they have each found time to birth and raise a single child to adolescence, all without seeming to have acquired a spouse at any point.

This is a problem for Beast's son Ben (Mitchell Hope), who is a month away from being crowned King of Auradon even though his father is still very much alive, and he issues a proclamation that four of the children imprisoned on the Isle of the Lost be freed from their slum to attend Auradon Prep Academy and perhaps learn to be decent human beings.

Maleficent thinks this is just grand, and charges her daughter Mal (Hope Cameron), Evil Queen's daughter Evie (Sofia Carson), Jafar's son Jay (the unfortunately named Booboo Stewart), and Cruella's son Carlos (Cameron Boyce) with the task of stealing Fairy Godmother's magic wand during their sojourn so that Maleficent can join it with her own magic staff and take over the world.

Can I just stop here for a second with a little beef?  It's bad enough that in this world, you are apparantly only allowed to name your child a derivative of your own name, but Evie?  Evil Queen's daughter is named Evie?  You know Evil Queen isn't her actual name, right?  She was the Queen of whatever kingdom Snow White was a princess of, and she sure was Evil, but she surely had a name.  It was probably Gruselda or something but it was a name. They retconned her a name in Once Upon A Time but they couldn't do it here? To name her daughter after the derogatory nickname her enemies gave her after the fact is like me naming my kid Nerdy.  And that's nothing on what they do to Jafar, here represented as a stereotypical Middle Eastern shopkeeper with none of the slinky leering cruelty he showed in Aladdin.  Wasn't he a genie the last time we saw him? He's been reduced to Apu. And why is Cruella there?  All the others actually caused harm to or threatened the life of a royal person.  Cruella kidnapped fifteen dogs.  That's literally the only crime she actually committed and it can't be proven.  

Okay, rant over for now.  The four kids are taken through the magical barrier to Auradon, where it is very much the twenty-first century and not the general middle ages where two thirds of the villains had their reigns of terror (and died, but let's not start nitpicking), where they're met by Ben and his girlfriend, Audrey (Sleeping Beauty's daughter!), and also Dopey's nerdy son Doug, who is not a Dwarf in any way. On their first night in their new digs they sneak out to find the magic wand, only to discover it's guarded by powerful magical security, and must wait out a month of school until Ben's coronation, when the wand will be used in the ceremony. The plot involves Mal concocting a love spell to make Ben dump Audrey and fall for her so that she can be front and centre during the coronation.

Will Mal find her evil heart softened by Ben's unquenchable goodness?  Will Jay discover that being part of a sports team is better than being an evil loner thief? Will Carlos discover dogs are really great and not the monsters his mother made him think they were? And will Evie learn that being smart and talented is better than being dumb and pretty?  You bet they will!

To be fair to Descendants, there's nothing really awful about the story or the way it's presented aside from its ridiculous concept, but since they bring that concept up over and over again it continues to get in the way of the movie working. The fact that you Only Matter if you're the child of a famous Disney character means that characters always have to stop what they're doing to mention which cartoon their parents were in. The most glaring example of this is when the only vaguely Asian member of the cast shows up and introduces herself: "Hi, I'm Lanny... (Pause, sigh, eye-roll) ...Mulan's daughter?"

If the movie has a secret weapon it's Hope Cameron as Mal.  It's not that she's doing much, although she manages to portray Mal as having at least two character traits while the rest of the cast is content to stick with just one.  But she has a screen presence that outdoes anyone else on screen at any time, stealing whatever scene she's in and making me really believe that she's confused about whether to be  good to her mother or good to her new friends. She's the best part of the movie, and I really hope that she one day escapes the circle of Disney TV Hell that has swallowed so many talented kids in the decade since Hanna Montana made sticking talented girls into horrible TV shows an industry. On the back side, her screen mother, Chenoweth's Maleficent, is the hands down nod for worst performance, shrieking her eeeeevil proclamations at the highest register and refusing to climb down to anything human.  Fine, she's the villain; her performance should be big.  But her biggest scene (and her one big musical number, the grating "Do Ya Wanna Be Evil?") is the third worst scene in the movie, and you can see the horror and confusion in her eyes when she stops singing to perform a half-hearted soft-shoe, suggesting that a dance choreographer was hired, but didn't show up that day, and director Ortega just told her to wing it.  

Stuck right in the middle is Mitchell Hope as Prince Ben.  Unable to shoulder the weight of doing all the heavy lifting for the "good" side, and unfortunately forced through two awful musical numbers - the overproduced and Autotuned "RiDICulous" is only saved from being the worst number in the film by being immediately followed by Hope's oh-so-white hip-hop rendition of "Be Our Guest" that is an insult not only to the original song but also to the entire medium of hip-hop and the ghost of Jerry Orbach.

Story: I dearly wish I could have seen a Suicide Squad of Disney Villains, but that's my own problem, not the movie's.  0.5 Points

Moral: Don't be evil? is the moral? I have nothing against it, I guess, but it's not exactly stretching the mind.  1 Point

Execution: CGI is used sparingly, thank goodness, and mostly to make sure the ball in the Big Sports Game goes where it's supposed to go without multiple takes.  I didn't mention that the Big Game is actually pretty well done.  Also, Hope Cameron's performance makes it look more like a movie than it really deserves. 1 Point

Songs: The Let's Meet The Villains song, "Rotten to the Core" is pretty good, and Mal gets a good "yearning" song, "If Only", but then there's Maleficent's cackling tap-dance and that horrible "Be Our Guest". 0.5 Points

Did My Kids Like It? Oh, yes they did.  All four times it played in the damn car.  My wife liked it too, although she'll never admit it except under duress. 1 Point

Total Score: 4/5 points.  

Commoners Make Us Less Special

Sometimes, persistence pays off.

You may recall how very disappointed I was that Barbie: The Princess and the Popstar turned out not to be quite the most vile thing I've ever seen.  There was nothing for it but to dive back into the well, risking my eyes, my ears and my sanity, to watch another Barbie movie.

Thank the sweet stars above, then, for Barbie: Princess Charm School, for being everything I thought it could be and more.  This is the vapid, miserable, bordering-on-child-abuse film I always expected from a Barbie movie, a soulless parade of eldritch abominations meant to pass as pretty girls marching dully through a rote, predictable story that shows to young girls everywhere just how special they can be if only they can pour tea properly and balance books on their heads.

I've said before, I don't like to harp on the animation of these DTV cheapies, but hot dang does this movie look bad.  Every character has the exact same face, the exact same face, and is only distinguishable by hairstyle.  It's lucky there are only a half dozen characters who matter, because there are only a few ways to do Blonde Barbie, Brunette Barbie and Redhead Barbie and still make the differences recognizable.  It's also lucky that nobody at the Princess Charm School ever caught on to the idea of trends in hairstyles or I'd have been lost in a sea of sideswept bangs and even creepier clone automatons than we have here. And then they go and put everybody in identical schoolgirl outfits - the socks, the plaid skirt, the little tie, the entire costume, available in lingerie shops everywhere. Even the male characters are indistinguishable - bad guys have square chins, good guys have pointed chins.  As pointless as they are to the movie it's lucky they have faces at all.  The only time anything looks like any care was taken to get the animation right is when the movie slows down long enough to ogle the main character's shapely legs.  Say one thing for director Zeke Norton, say he's a leg man.

Princess Charm School is the story of a poor _____(noun), found on a doorstep as a baby and invited, with great surprise, to attend a special school for ______(fantastical plural noun).   ______(name) struggles with classes, despite the gentle guidance of the kindly __________(authority figure, noun), only to discover an evil plot to ____________(verb the adjective noun), involving an evil teacher, that calls back to the deaths of _______(name)'s parents, many years ago.  With time running out and only two mismatched friends to count on, it's up to ______(name) to master the courage and fortitude that have been the true curriculum at ____________(name of school), to defeat the villain and find the magic __________(preposterous noun).  Thanks for playing the Harry Potter Madlibs, everybody!

Now over the last decade and change there have been literally hundreds of ripoffs of that simple story, but never have I seen one that did such a perfect job of sucking all the fun and wonder out of the scenario as this.  Harry Potter was escapist children's fantasy that entranced both boys and girls.  It was a haunted school with sentient staircases, talking paintings, and instead of the boring math and science classes of the real world every class was another lesson on how to enhance your superpowers. Even without its Chosen One plot, it was a world every child of its target age wanted to live in.  Princess Charm School replaces that with shoes, makeup and the doldrums of elocution and manners classes.  Every little girl's dream! 

Anyway, our Harry in this case is Blair Willows (Diana Kaarina), a poor waitress with a sick mother and an adorable (supposedly) moppet of a sister named Emily.  Blair is apparently eighteen years old, although her age isn't revealed until very late in the movie, and the indistinct faces of Barbie characters make her look about twenty-five, so it's as much a shock to us as to her when she is selected by lottery to be the only "commoner" (do people really still use that word?) in Gardania to attend the illustrious Princess Charm School.  Should she graduate, which an appallingly few "commoners" do, she'll be... well, not a princess, that's made very clear, but a Lady Royal, some kind of princess attachè.

Upon arriving at PCS, Blair's natural inferiority to the real princesses is drummed into her over and over by the bullying Delancy (Brittney Wilson) and her mother, Dame Devin (Nicole Oliver), who is apparently the school's only teacher, but also lives in the palace and is somehow the dead queen's sister despite having been a lottery winner like Blair, once upon a time.  Holy hell, this thing's as full of holes as my backup underwear.  

But with the help of the kindly Miss Privet (Morwenna Banks), the headmistress of PCS, Blair is able to overcome the clumsiness that comes of being a normal human being who has never had to balance a book on her head, to "find the princess inside of her",  This is depicted in a kind of Karate Kid-like training montage, and yes, the poise and balance of a charm school graduate is likened to martial arts more than once.  Supposedly all the business of balancing books and staying prim while pouring tea is an exercise in building confidence, and if one has the confidence to do these things than one has the confidence to rule. 

Hey, movie?  You know what else gives confidence? A proper education and a grounding in the basic knowledge of the world through science, math and language skills, none of which seem to be taught at PCS.

Yes, I said to rule, because in this monarchy, the princess is the supreme ruler, and for reasons best left idly on the side, Delancy is set to be crowned Princess of Gardania, unless Blair can find the magic crown that proves she is the rightful heir(ess), orphaned seventeen years ago when Dame Devin murdered the entire royal family.  Will she?  Only with the help of her two plucky best friends, of course! But seriously, wouldn't it be hilarious if she went to all that trouble and broke who knows how many laws, many punishable by death, based solely on her vague resemblance to a painting in the palace of a kingdom where everybody looks the same and the fact that a dog likes her, and then she wasn't the crown princess?

It's disappointingly reductive, doing everything to hammer home the idea that good girls look pretty and glide effortlessly and that's it, and it's all so crushingly banal that it doesn't even work on a so-bad-it's-good level.  It's an aggressively mediocre movie, weighed down by its predictable story and unfunny comic relief.

In short, it's everything a Barbie movie should be.

Story: No, you don't get points for ripping off Harry Potter this badly. 0 Points

Moral: There's a princess inside all of us, so balance those books, girls! (Seriously, book-balancing is the only skill anybody cares about in this movie) 0 Points

Execution: The characters are all uniformly creepy, and even the jokes by the designated Stupid Girl fall flat in a movie that desperately needed livening up with some humour. 0 Points

Songs: Only three, and the characters never stop what they're doing to burst into song.  The songs aren't terrible, just forgettable, but the big dance number that closes out the movie is brain-shatteringly irritating. 0.5 Points

Did My Kids Like It? Again, I'm scratching this one off.  My daughters will never be exposed to this piece of crap as long as I'm drawing air. N/A

Score: 0.5/4

Light Up The Dark Again

All right, I'm confused.  I've believed for the longest time that the Barbie movies are the most dispicable cash-ins, throwing vile characters and by-numbers stories with grotesque animation onto a screen to sell dolls to little girls, espousing only the most reductive of values and lessons about looking your best and wearing pink - far worse than anything released by the Disney Princess line in terms of utter unwatchability and brain-melting ideals.  Perhaps that's what the Barbie movies as a whole really are, and I will have to watch more (shudder) to be sure, but The Princess and the Popstar  isn't... that.

Oh, it's no hidden masterpiece, to be sure, and they were dead on about the animation, but when it comes to DTV children's movies, I was led to believe the Barbie movies were the absolute bottom of an incredibly deep barrel.  But look, I just saw Pup a week ago, and compared to that supposedly more legitimate film, TPATP is nearly redeemable.  It still looks like a cutscene from a particularly bad video game from 1997, in fact it looks as if it was animated by people who are aware that humans have limbs and have heard about their movements thirdhand, and its pleasant "be yourself and do it your way" moral loses something when the only humans it cares about are decadent princesses and glamorous pop stars, but on the scale of things, it's not that bad.  Believe me, there is a soggy taste in my mouth for saying that.

Anyway, we meet our heroes, Princess Tori (Kelly Sheridan, sung by Jennifer Waris) of the kingdom of Mirabella, and Kira the Popstar (Ashleigh Ball, sung by Tiffany Giardina), who are both dissatisfied with their wonderful, wonderful lives. Tori is being bossed around by her domineering aunt, the Duchess Amelia (Ellie King), who only wants her to be a proper princess and serve her kingdom well.  As punishment for basically taking on the roles of both mother and father to the girl (at first I thought her father was dead - nope, he's just completely unimportant and has nothing to do with his daughter's life), Tori uses her magical hairbrush to play awful pranks on her.  Oh yes, she has a magical hairbrush.  And is a horrible person. Annoyed by the drudgery of standing still and looking pretty that is her entire life's work, she yearns for the freedom and excitement she is certain her favourite pop star enjoys.

Meanwhile, Kira has lost the spark that made singing the joy of her life, what with all the costume changes, choreography and dealing with her sleazy manager Crider (Peter Kalamis), and yearns for the simple ease and luxury enjoyed, she is sure, by the local princess.

A publicity stunt meeting between the two girls affords them an opportunity and a wicked idea - To use Tori's magic brush and Kira's magic microphone (yes, she has one) to switch their creepy interchangeable faces into new hair and outfits for a day so each can enjoy the other's life.  Unfortunately that day is the day of Kira's big show, and also the day Tori is supposed to give a speech about the kingdom's anniversary, which neither one is prepared for.  Also, Crider has decided to steal Mirabella's secret Diamond Gardenia, a magical bush that funds the kingdom, to finance his own musical dreams. You see, Crider was once the star of an irritating children's show until puberty killed off his beautiful voice, and his career.  And look, I can relate.  I was once the star of my school's musical production of Oliver until my cherub-like voice cracked opening night, but that didn't make me a bitter budding super villain with an irritating squeaky voice and terrible one-liners... I don't think so anyway.

The Barbie movies have always been ostensibly musicals, and usually that's a sign of bad things to come, but to be honest, the songs in TPATP aren't awful.  Credit goes to Giardina, whose dusky voice makes all of Kira's songs, no matter how insipid the lyrics, actually ring with emotion and truth - as much truth as anything sung by Ariana Grande or Selena Gomez anyway (it is pop music after all).    Much worse is Waris as Tori - whenever she has a number you can literally hear the Autotune warbling out of the speakers. And aside from one number - the awful "To Be A Princess/To Be A Popstar", in which both Tori and Kira sing about how so much of their lives involve shoes and standing straight and looking gorgeous - the songs all sound like legitimate pop songs.  Important, because any movie claiming "Popstar" in the title had better sound at least decent.  In fact, Kira's signature number, "Here I Am" is actually really successful, catchy, fun and forgettable, like the best of pop music. It's an earworm, still stuck in my head as I write this, and not a bad one either. 

Grace notes intrude all the time on what should be a tremendously awful film - the scene where Tori, forced on stage in Kira's disguise, elects to sing her song unplugged because she knows the words and guitar chords but not the choreography, is the best moment in the entire movie, ringing with pathos and emotion missing from the rest of her entire performance, but there are even a few good jokes.  Three, actually, three good jokes, all in the last ten minutes and two of them spoken by Crider's until-now irritating comic sidekick Rupert (Jonathan Holmes).  On the other hand, it's so rushed and perfunctory - everybody speaks as if they have exactly seven and a half minutes to perform their lines before they're kicked out of the recording studio.  A glaringly bad example is when Kira's talking dog meets Tori's talking dog, and Kira's dog says "Nice digs!" and I thought he said "Nice dicks!"

There are nods to girl-power here and there.  Kira and Tori actually find a way to use their ridiculous fashion-magic powers to save the day, and the third really good joke in the whole thing involves the handsome prince "rescuing the damsels" only to find the damsels have run off to save the kingdom, but it always comes back to the fact that this movie is telling little girls to be themselves, as long as they can be glamorous, rich and pretty.  It's no accident that there is no "pauper" in this Prince and the Pauper revisioning - you only matter if you're a princess, or a popstar.


Story: I gotta give it this one.  1 Point
Moral: Be Yourself - as long as you're famous and hot. On the other hand, Kira's whispered cheer of "Do it your way" during Tori's show, coming right on the heels of the best part of the movie, speaks louder than that reductive implied message. 0.5 Points
Songs: Better than expected.  I'll give it a little more than half. 0.75 Points
Execution: The writers and voice actors tried to make a real movie.  The animators didn't, or couldn't. The CGI is nightmare fuel. I've said before, you work with the budget you've got, and I try not to harp on the animation, but I've seen cheaper movies that looked better, so it loses half a point. 0.5 Points
Did My Kids Like It? I'll be honest.  I didn't show this to them.  I was afraid of what it might teach them.  I still haven't decided if I'll let them watch it.  Let's be overly fair and strike this category. N/A
Score: 2.75/4, and I'm legitimately sad that the score wasn't worse.  I wanted to tear this movie a new one. 

A Bunch Of Strange, Horribly Ugly Creatures - Naked, Without Any Fur... We're Talkin' Bloodthirsty, Awful Beasts! They Call Themselves Humans

In Africa, a colourful collection of animals discovers their water holes are drying up. The culprit is a massive concrete dam across the river that feeds the Savannah.
In Greenland, a polar bear is cast adrift by the cataclysmic melting of the glacier she lives on.
In the Galapagos, the drunken crew of a French oil tanker runs aground, spilling oil across the ocean.
In Australia refracted sunlight from a broken bottle causes a massive brushfire.
On a cruise ship, a chicken is... tortured by a sadistic chef?

The biggest problem with environmental message movies, especially those geared to children, is that they come off as either goofy or outright stupid thanks to the level of contrivance it requires to bring the gradual effects of ecological change into a fast-paced adventure narrative. The worst offenders tend to be overly preachy as well, and if anything hurt their message more than they help.  Nobody likes to be preached to, and especially not children.

Which is why Animals United seems at the very start to be an incredibly strong contender for an ecofable. It follows, essentially, the plot of a Roland Emmerich-style disaster movie, i.e.. a series of crises around the globe unites a small and diverse band of heroes to try and save the day.  The twist is, the heroes are wild animals and the apocalyptic force destroying their homes is... us.

It's easily the cleverest "hook" for a save-the-environment adventure I've ever seen, and the first twenty minutes of the film are full of rip-roaring thrills, genuine pathos and gorgeous, gorgeous animation. Unfortunately it doesn't sustain that high level of quality throughout.

It seems that aping the model of an Emmerich movie includes aping all of those movies' flaws, including dull, characters, unfortunate ethnic stereotypes (why are all the Water Buffalo on the African Savannah depicted as Mexican gang members?), and action setpieces of gradually decreasing quality.  We can immediately see the usual cast of disaster movie characters - here's the screwup father who just wants to be a hero in the eyes of his son! here's the elderly couple who are so totally going to die in each others' arms! here's the gay orangutan hairdresser! and the farting Tasmanian Devil!

Here's the unnecessarily eeeeevil hunter (named Hunter), who so hates all manner of animal life that he utters in utter seriousness the line "I really don't trust that monkey" and also at one point will abandon his rifle in favour of a... biplane that fires state-of-the-art missiles?

But it looks gorgeous, even at its worst.  There's a butterfly in the opening minutes of the film that's just impossibly beautiful, verging on photorealism, and while none of it is going to make anyone forget the Lion King, the sun-kissed fur on the chin of the (vegetarian) lion Socrates is really a triumph of CGI.

Story: Honestly, this one almost got a full point. But at the end the animals stage a full-on invasion of New York, and... no.  No, I'm sorry. No. 0.5 Points
Execution: It really, really looks like a movie.  Full marks. 1 Point
Moral: Animals and man can live in harmony if we just stop sticking our greedy mitts into every corner of the planet?  Full marks.  1 Point
Songs: No original songs, the characters bop along to successful hits that are now public domain.  No objections. On the other hand, there is a scene where a meerkat falls into a piranha tank, and the score during the resulting action sequence is the kind of music meant to open your eyes to the wonders of the world, not to underscore a dangerous chase. It's a weird choice that docks it half a point. 0.5 Points
Did My Kids Like It? They did. 1 Point.
Score: 4/5

Put This Pup Down

There is a scene in the middle of Pup where the heroes defeat an army of spiders by urinating on them.  That should be all you need to know to decide to have nothing to do with this film, but if it isn't, please, let me go on to say that the spiders (who work in a sweatshop making clothes, and we'll get to that later) are animated and voiced to be the most offensive Asian stereotypes I've ever seen outside of a 1940's comic strip, because who works in sweatshops? Asians do, har har!  Also the urine is lovingly rendered in all of its disgusting glory, a torrent of viscous yellow-green slime that first gushes then oozes across the screen leaving dead racist stereotypes in its wake.  If it's absolutely the most memorable moment in this horrible little movie about interspecies romance and genetically modified astronaut dogs, it's only because the rest of the thing is just so dull and pointless that only something truly grotesque can stand out.

This is a Spanish-made film, so I can only assume that something was seriously lost in the translation, although I doubt it was a Pixar-level masterpiece in its original language.  Still, you can tell where jokes were intended that never made it past the redub - there are moments where characters say things, then other characters hold for a frame, do a double-take, and then roll their eyes, but the lines of dialogue that go along with these moments include knee-slappers like "All sheep are brothers and sisters. It's just the way it is. By the way, when is curfew tonight?" and "You! Why aren't you globalized?  You know, all puffed up like a balloon?".

We know we're in for a bad time when one of the first spoken lines involves a butterfly insulting a cow's weight.  That's the joke.  The pretty butterfly is mean and douchey, and he calls the cow "fatty", and it's apropos of nothing to come before or after.  The entire film is filled with wonderful little moments like this, wherein one farm animal calls another stupid, or tells her to shut up, or the angry farmer who hates the Pup of the title seems to have an overly strong affection for a girl sheep.  All of this in a world where, right outside the farm's fences where the animals behave like animals and the humans like humans, there are successful wolf fashion designers with hip California pads, and the aforementioned astronaut dogs.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Back to the farm, where we meet Kanuto (Wayne Grayson, who sometimes sounds like Matthew Broderick and sometimes like the jolly British narrator of a children's TV show), a happy-go-lucky Pup who is training to be a sheepdog.  Kanuto's life is turned upside down when Blackie, a black sheep with a mean streak, arrives on the farm, and Kanuto immediately falls in love with her.  Which makes this an interspecies love triangle, now that I think of it, and that might be the worse thing ever (No wait, there's still sweatshop spiders drowning in urine yet to come.  The second worst thing, then).

Anyway, Blackie is hated by everyone except the dog and the farmer, and goes out of her way to insult everyone she meets, until one day for reasons that make very little sense she decides she's going to the moon, and everybody better get out of her way.  The details are fuzzy, but the broad strokes of her actions involve getting her and her three white sheep sisters captured by Karl Wolf, a wolf who wears a tie and glasses and har har, the wolf doesn't want to eat the sheep, he wants to steal their wool to make his cheap sweatshop clothing.  Meanwhile a new dog arrives on the farm, Rumbo, a bulldog who dresses like the gay biker from the Village People and talks like the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, and makes the farm animals lives a living hell.

Kanuto rescues Blackie and the other sheep from the sweatshop, and here we have our racist urinestravaganza, and then the odd couple fall in with a trio of dogs in Kabuki masks who turn out for no reason to be an international team of genetically modified astronaut dogs.  They mistake Kanuto for one of their own (or he really is a genetically modified astronaut dog, it's never clear), and let him in on their plan - they have a rocket to the moon on top of the mountain, and have been trying to reach it for years, their efforts stymied every time by a murderous, glowing, pink mutant sheep named Pinky.  This is, I remind you, within walking distance of a Tim Gunn wolf and a farm where humans live in pastoral ignorance.

I'll admit one thing - the end of the movie actually surprised me, probably because with no logical progression throughout the rest of the movie the filmmakers were free to just throw a random assortment of tropes at the thing and call it an ending, but I honestly did not see it going where it did. That's not to say that it went anywhere worth going yourself.

This movie embodies everything I hate about children's programming.  It's not so much a story as a loose collection of unrelated scenes thrown in not because they are in any way entertaining  but because it puffed the running time to feature length.  It's animated cheaply, though I won't hold that against it per se; you work with the budget you have.  But it's also edited very badly.  Scenes continue on long after they've been dug into the ground and nearly every shot feels like it should have the director whispering "action" right before the characters start to move, even though it's a cartoon.  Worse are the characters.  Besides the awful Asian stereotypes and the two gay stereotypes (did I mention that the evil gay wolf and the evil gay bulldog end up together? I should have), we have that needlessly cruel butterfly, the idiot surfer duck, the farmer who I just can't even look at.  And then there's our two I shudder to use the word lovers.  Blackie is a painful creature to spend two hours with.  She's mean to literally everybody - seriously, every one of her lines is either an insult or a whine about the moon - to the point where when she's supposed to have our sympathy at the end we just wish the mutant sheep would eat her.  And Kanuto, oh Kanuto.  One part bad Bugs Bunny ripoff, one part condescending asshole.  He's in love with Blackie, and I get it that she treats him like crap, but the whole idea of this kind of story is that you feel for the poor guy in blind love because he never gives up on her.  Kanuto is just as cruel as she is, crueler in fact, because while Blackie 's insults are more sarcastic than outright mean, Kanuto seems to always choose the cruelest things to say.  It's the difference between being insulted by a deadpan comedian or Gordon Ramsay. I shudder to think what their relationship would be like.

Story - 0
Moral - I don't know, something like, follow your dreams, but give them up if they get in the way of soul-crushing domestic servitude.  0
Songs -  Thankfully only one, but it is both pointless, irritating and repeated three times. 0
Execution - 0
Did My Kids Like It? The little one didn't even look up at it.  The older one lost interest about a third of the way through, which is a very good thing, although she seemed almost angrily happy about the Spider/urine scene, but I think that has more to do with a fear of armies of spiders and less to do with the urine or the racism. 0

Score: 0/5, and a more perfect film to start off this blog I could not have found.

Mission Statement

Children are our most precious resource.
Children are our future.
Our children deserve nothing but the best to grow their impressionable little minds.
So why is children's entertainment so terrible? 

Every day, in living rooms across the country, parents are parking their kids in front of the TV with little to no thought as to what it is they're watching.  Oh, they're not putting on Die Hard or the Exorcist.  They're tuning into Disney Junior or Nickelodeon or popping in a Blu-Ray they picked up that afternoon with the vague thought "the kids'll like it". They're making sure their children aren't being exposed to pornography or graphic violence.  What they mostly aren't doing is checking to see if it's any good.

Now, "good" is a very subjective term, and one that is pretty often tossed aside when it comes to kids' movies. "I don't really like it," thinks the caring parent, "but they do.  It might not be good, but it's good enough for a kid's movie." Forgetting that a billion dollar industry is cranking out crap every second of every day hoping no one will pay attention to it, because it's "good enough for a kids' movie".

Now I remember being a kid.  I remember being sat down in front of a few real stinkers.  I have particular memories of a video called Leo the Lion, King of the Jungle, a direct-to-video nightmare sold entirely on the hope that its target audience would only notice the middle two words of that title. I remember feeling my hard-won intellect leaking out through my ears, but also feeling distinctly (and most likely incorrectly) that if I were to let my Mom know that I hated this movie she'd bought me, I would hurt her feelings.  So I held my silence.

Leo the Lion, King of the Jungle, which I fully intend to review in its entire awful glory on this blog, had lacklustre animation, irritating characters, a trite (even for little kids) moral that was lathered on with all the subtlety of a shovel to the face, and it had songs.  Oh my sweet Jesus, it had songs.  Awful little noodles of neither pleasant tune nor moving lyric, sung by voice actors with no singing ability.  But by God, those Disney fellas had songs, so Leo the Lion had better have some @#*% songs too.

The problem is, nobody's minding the store.  The people making these things don't care.  The people buying these things don't care - that's the great trick.  Nobody cares except maybe the kids watching, and only if they're aware in a vague way that a crime on their psyche is being committed.

Well, no more!  No more Leo the Lions, say I!  I make it my solemn duty to be the only person above the age of ten who cares about these movies.  To paraphrase another, better internet critic, I care about them so you don't have to.

I'll be reviewing children's movies, mostly the kind that come direct-to-video and therefore fly under the radar of the more established critics, and I'll be reviewing them based on the following five categories:

Story - Is the story predictable? Does it try to do anything new?  I mean, every story is brand-new to a five-year old, but that's no reason not to at least try to make it unique.

Moral - Is there a moral at all?  Is it an acceptable moral for a child in the 21st century?  Is it delivered respectfully through characters and situations?  This is the category where "harmless" movies are separated from actual crimes against children.

Songs - Are there songs?  Full marks if there are not.  If there are, are they at least decent?  Please??

Execution - Does it work as a movie?  This is very subjective but very easy to determine.  For example, I have to date seen three animated versions of Beauty and the Beast.  Only one of them can claim to be actually entertaining, though all three tell the exact same story.

Did My Kids Like It? This is the only category I won't be judging for myself.  We have to be fair - sometimes the kids are right.  I'll be asking my two children their thoughts on the matter.

A movie that succeeds at each category will receive a score of 5/5.  On point will be lost for each failing category.

Away we go!