★ 4 / 10
Very Flawed, but Good for the Kids
kieraemca
I had no idea what to expect when going into the film. Was I going to get a completely awful and painful experience? Would it be a timeless and little-known…
I had no idea what to expect when going into the film. Was I going to get a completely awful and painful experience? Would it be a timeless and little-known treasure? Would it be so hilariously bad that I'd get a good laugh out of it?
In the end, though I did laugh at some of the poorer voice acting and some of the cheesiness, the movie was mostly a mixed bag. With each new scene, I had no clue what I was going to get. There were plenty of surprises; some good, some bad.
Let me start with my main complaints: Although each dwarf had a personality, as did the villain Dellamorta, but Princess Rose and Jack had absolutely nothing. They felt like plastic action figures that the director was controlling in the background, and Snow White was completely pointless to the plot. The voice acting also got pretty bad at points, especially with Jack. I laughed quite a lot whenever I heard him speak, regardless of what he actually said. Everything about his voice just seemed so off, so uncaring, that I had to giggle.
The pacing was also very off, nothing really flowed properly. At first, I thought this would be an adventure film, but eventually it turned out that it would take over half an hour just for the curse to be put into place, followed by another ten minutes of planning for the trip, and then suddenly the dwarfs are right outside Dellamorta's castle. The part with the suicidal tap-dancing dragon also felt like it came out of nowhere. I will say, however, that this part did give Bobo some nice character development.
And my last complaint was the music. It was atrocious. The final song was forgettable, but passable, but other than that, just no. The first song is literally about making a cake, that later gets destroyed, and has no real bearing on the plot. Sitting through that song was pain enough, but having it turn out to be a pointless musical outburst really made me angry. Then there was the rip-off of High-ho it's off to work we go that the dwarfs were constantly singing, and every time it came on I had to turn the volume off. It was that annoying. I will say that the villain's song gave her a reason to hate the king, even if it was an exposition song and it wasn't a good one at that.
Now for the good things. I think that having Sleeping Beauty/Rose wear a suit of armor all her life was a very creative and interesting change to the story. The castle covering itself in ice was also a very interesting interpretation on the curse. Although the movie was poorly paced, Bobo and the dragon Bernie did have decent character arcs and the rest of the dwarfs at least had a little character. The animation was nothing to write home about, but there was nothing too poor about it as long as the object being animated wasn't in a liquid state. (Seriously, any liquid in this movie looked awful) But despite a few animation hiccups, the characters were all well designed, and I will give the film props for having Rose and Jack already be in love before the curse was put into effect.
Overall, there were a lot of original and interesting ideas and decent animation. If the story would have been better paced with less exposition and more well-rounded characters, the movie could have been something I might have even enjoyed. However, I do not regret watching it, and there is nothing bad in it for kids, so in the end The Seventh Dwarf is a good movie for the younger audiences it is directed at. 4/10
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★ 3 / 10
One big fairy tale muddle
TheLittleSongbird
As a huge fan of animation and as someone intrigued with the idea of mixing different fairy tale characters, Fairytale: Story of Seven Dwarfs, despite a few…
As a huge fan of animation and as someone intrigued with the idea of mixing different fairy tale characters, Fairytale: Story of Seven Dwarfs, despite a few good qualities, was a let down.
While the animation isn't amazing, it's not awful either, and is the asset of Fairytale: Story of Seven Dwarfs that comes off the least badly. A lot of the character designs with the exceptions of Burny and the ice monster (both of which are pretty cool-looking) are ugly and lack expression, but the colours are beautiful and vibrant and the backgrounds have a lot of colour and detail. The fairy tale references early on in the film are fun to spot, some of the music score has the right amount of energy and melodious whimsy and while the voice acting on the whole is not that great Nina Hagen is deliciously evil as Dellamorta.
The character designs, as aforementioned, are ugly with a couple of exceptions. The songs are very weak, they try to be emotive and sweet but sound irritating, mawkish and dumbed down and escape your head after a few hours. Fairytale: Story of Seven Dwarfs contains a muddled script, with lots of half-baked moral lessons, juvenile dialogue and misplaced innuendo that interferes with the generally safe (perhaps too safe) tone the film adopts. The story had a very good concept, but spoils it with a complete lack of wit or originality, it's mostly pretty charmless too, most of the second half seemed rushed, some parts felt randomly shoe-horned in and any emotional parts seemed downplayed or forced.
Fairytale: Story of Seven Dwarfs has characters that are not only visually unappealing but annoy rather than charm, and that's including the dwarfs. There are even some racially stereotypical mermen. And of the voice acting, Hagen is the only one who doesn't irritate or sound bored. Overall, has moments but is one big fairy tale muddle as an overall whole. 3/10 Bethany Cox
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80%
AUDIENCE
4.6/10
1.5K
