I found this to be really cute, but also a little cringey. First off I want to say that if you aren't a fan of the Descendants franchise (or a die-hard one for the matter) than you probably won't get much enjoyment out of this. Personally, I live and breathe descendants so I honestly kinda liked it, but let me do a little overview. So basically, it's Halloween night and Mal, Evie, Carlos and Jay are in some unknown place in Auradon I imagine. After they get tired of trick-or-treating (which I admit is a little strange for a bunch of 18-year-olds, but who am I to judge) they wander into some wicked woods. Before this however, Mal decides to scare her friends with the story of the headless horseman, and it works fairly well considering they scream after the story... for some reason (probably just to exaggerate their fear). As they're walking through the woods, they end up encountering the headless horseman, who ends up just being Uma and Audrey pulling a prank on them. There's a little music number, which was surprisingly a bop (I'm a sucker for singing out of the blue). After this, they actually meet the real headless horseman, but this time they aren't very scared, unlike last time when they were so scared that they literally bolted. The headless horseman ends up just taking a piece of candy (not there heads, like in Mal's story) and leaving. Ands that's about it. There is some humor here and there, while also incorporating the Halloween-spook factor which was fun. I think I would've enjoyed this more if it were live-action rather than stop-motion animation. Then again, that might've been difficult to keep child-friendly considering one of the characters doesn't have a head. Overall, it was cute, a little cheesy and cliché, but it always makes me laugh so that's nice.
2 Reviews
Only for the biggest fans of the films
Horst_In_Translation13 December 2019
Warning: Spoilers
"Wicked Woods: A Descendants Halloween Story" is a pretty long title for this really short film we got here. It runs for 5 minutes approximately and was directed by Melissa Goodwin Shepherd and written by Nathan Shepherd and the two are actually married. You will probably not recognize the names immediately, even if the two have worked on films in many different areas such as the animation department too, so it is probably not too surprising that here we have an animated movie. Stop-motion animation to be precise. By the way on a side note, the director is the younger sister of Ginnifer Goodwin, who has her own history of fantasy television for sure. But let us not get into detail too much there and instead focus on this film here. You already find out from the title what this is about. It takes place in teh Descendants universe and I applaud you if you actually thought of the George Clooney / Alexander Payne film first, but no this is for the kids from the fairy-tale based films. And it is not a fan project. The actors and actresses from these films give their voices here to their animated selves. And also from the title you can read Halloween, so there is a bit of scare factor in here, namely in the formm of The Headless Horseman. Initially, it is just some other kids from the gang pulling a prank on the main characters, but at the end the real one appears. I wondered though why when realizing it is the actual horror character they do not run away scared to death the way they do early on. Oh well, I guess this film was more supposed to be made for the fun aspect and not really to make sense. This would also explain why the Horseman is much more about harvesting some candy (had he taken it all at least, come on) than about scaring anybody in here. And they give it to him. By the way was that some (not so) hidden advertizing in there? Not too important though I guess. In-between, there is also some singing from one character and that does not really come as a surprise as music is of course one of the key components of this franchise. So yeah that would be all. I did not like it too much and I thought it could be funnier. But it definitely isn't failure either, even if the animation is definitely not Aardman level. The mouths looked sometimes really strange when the characters were speaking. Overall, I don't think you need a recommendation from me really because if you consider watching this one, then most likely you have seen at least one, probably all 3 Descendants films so far and I guess you liked them and then you can check this one out too. In general, I'd still give it a thumbs-down. Don't think this can turn you into a fan or make you curious about the live action films really and anyway it is much nicer to see the stunning Dove Cameron in person. So my suggestion is to watch something else instead.
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