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!