Change Your Image
swiftnimblefoot
Reviews
A Tale Dark & Grimm (2021)
Dark, funny and woth witty dialogue!
I went into this show without any knowledge of the book, or any expectations, and found myself enjoying it a lot. Was hooked after one episode, and I found myself both laughing at the extremely funny jokes and being touched by the very emotional story. Looking up the cast, I found that Doug Langdale wrote some episode, who was also a writer on a favourite show of mine, The Adventures of Puss in Boots, and I was like WOW this explains so much!
The show has much of the same, quotable, extremely funny dialogue, and generally, clever writing that does not dumb things down for kids, and drops clues about important events to come later. The story is loosely based around several original Grimm's fairy tales, and I do mean THE original german ones - not the watered down modern versions by Disney. Those tails were dark and full of hard lessons, and not every story or character had a happy ending. While this show can be dark at times, the humor never goes away, and that is mostly thanks to our really funny narrator ravens, the serious William, the down-to-earth Jacob and the absolutely bonkers Dotty, who for me was the standout character of the show with her gallows humor and almost Dory-like forgetfulness.
The animation is nice, and the storybook style background transitions make the whole thing work like a book. There are a lot of surprise twists and memorably weird and likeable characters. In both writing and art style, actually, you could easily see this show being set in the same Shrek-verse as The Adventures of Puss in Boots was.
Greatly recommended, and I hope much like how Dotty said at the end, we get a spinoff or next season. While the story of Hansel and Gretel is told, our three narrators could still cover other stories.
My Little Pony: A New Generation (2021)
So I guess everything Twilight Sparkle and her friends worked for was for naught?
I watched this movie today, and all throughout as we saw what a terrible disjointed segregated place Equestria became, I felt more and more like I did when watching Star Wars - The Force Awakens. Except here, likely centuries passed instead of 25 years, but it does seem that nothing our heroes did for several years, all the hardships they endured, the friendships they forged, mattered. Twilight just thwarted a plot by villains to drive the three races of ponies apart in the last season... and now she is gone and her teachings of friendship forgotten, and earth ponies, unicorns and pegasi live apart, in fear of each other.
...Except, even this setting makes no sense. The earth ponies are terrified of the magic of unicorns and the flying pegasi. But we learn quickly unicorns cannot use magic anymore, and pegasi cannot fly. And neither did the three species keep in contact - none of the characters in the movie have ever seen another pony type in their lives. So WHY would they be so afraid of some invisible boogeyman that it dominates their lives, so much they build capture devices against unicorns and pegasi?
The crystals are another dumb retcon -pegasi can fly normally because, y'know, they have WINGS...? But nope, in this movie, that is magical too. So our intrepid heroes have to unite three gems. If you guessed that there would be a third gem for the non-existing powers of earth ponies, and there would be a third act "we failed, I am useless" cliche moment, you guessed right.
The characters are shallow copies of the Friendship of Magic ones. Sunny is Twilight once again - studious, curious, and shunned for being awkward. Except while Twilight spent long seasons truly understanding both friendship and magic, earning her status as princess... Sunny just states the obvious ("The power was in our unity all along!") and immediately becomes an alicorn princess.
The others aren't great either. Izzy is basically Pinkie Pie as a unicorn, with boundless optimism and laughter, but not much else (none of the quirky randomness that made Pinkie truly funny). Zipp is just Rainbow Dash, the athletic, daring tomboy, with even a similar mane style. Hitch is just mainly a foil for the female characters, placed there so he can learn his lesson and accept Sunny for what she is, and Pip is like every annoying internet celebrity ever, complete with her own tiktok videos.
The world makes little sense, with pegasi royals pretending they can fly via wires (no, they do not oppress the others, it is never really explained why this was a good idea, but it ends up getting them imprisoned when things fail). Unicorns are all emo slackers with weird superstitions.
Our villain is probably the worst, as he is more of an afterthought - a childish loser deputy who rises to the top by fearmongering, at the end declaring himself basically the God-Emperor of Ponyville. If the allusions were not clear enough, he even says "Those who scream loudest must be right" and "A million voices can't be wrong!" - I half expected he would also say he would make Equestria great again... At the end he builds a giant pony-mech but the final confrontation consists of him ramming a lighthouse and our heroes running around to try to place the macguffins in their sockets. Rather boring.
Also, there are songs. A lot of them. None very memorable.
The CGI is serviceable, not anything special. The character faces look way too similar, and it is hard to tell females and males apart.
If this was its own universe, I would say it is a harmless child flick seen and quickly forgotten. But because it basically says nothing that happened in 7 seasons of MLP FiM matters... I rate it lower than "meh".
Jellystone (2021)
An unfunny grotesque travesty
So, I guess Hanna Barbera got the Teen Titans Go treatment too. After the abysmal DC comics, I am not surprised.
The base idea could have been good - throw all the HB characters into one town and make it a sitcom. The Looney Tunes Show did that, and it worked well, because they did not significantly change the characters personalities and rather expanded on them.
Here though, the characters often share nothing at all other than the name of the originals. Yogi, Cindy and Boo-Boo for example, are now... doctors? HOW? WHY??? Yogi turned from "smarter than the average bear" (a sentence he never says on the show, btw) to Homer Simpson levels of dumb, while Cindy is an amoral super smart mad scientist. This feels so arbitrary, like the writers just put the names and professions in a hat and pulled them randomly.
The only characters who remain somewhat close to their original selves are Huckleberry Hound (now an unflappable and stoic mayor), Snagglepuss (now town reporter and talkshow host, with oddly all his gay trends removed) and perhaps Doggie Daddy who is now a worried helicopter dad for his daughter Auggie Doggie, Yakky Doodle,
Oh yes, daughter. See, Looney Tunes Show added existing or new female characters (Lola, Tina, Petunia, Granny) - this show went the lazy way, and genderswapped characters. A LOT of them. Just to list a few, Jabberjaw, Auggie Doggie, Loopy De Loop, Squiddly Diddly, 3 members of Top Cat's gang, 2 members of The King's gang (ridiculously, considering that gang had 2 female characters too who now do not appear at all), Chopper, Baba Looey.... they are all female now. Given also that their personalities are nothing like the old ones, would it not have been better to make new female characters instead?
Because the show basically just needed archetypes, and then the writers put the "skin" of some existing HB character on that. Jabberjaw is the vallye girl, for example, Loopey De Loop is now a jaded cynical snob (in contrast to his helpful and always optimistic personality). The Banana Splits are small time criminals. Wally Gator is implied to be a cannibal (WTF?) Magilla Gorilla is a clothes shop owner and fashionista. They could have literally made this show without using HB characters and nobody would have cared, so - like Thundercats Roar, or the new She-ra, they had to sell their product using an existing IP.
Now again, all this I could forgive if the humor was good. It isn't. It is unfunny or downright disgusting, and creepy. Our very first episode is basically, a vore one - Cindy solves Yogi's constant stomach aches by making him (against his will) an atomic stomach. Now however, Yogi is always hungry and will eat anything--- and anyone. So we get creepy scenes of Yogi stalking and devouring his friends, then feeling bad afterwards. Another episode has Cindy be late with his book club read, so to have time to read it, she invents a jelly gun that turns her best friends into jell-o. It gets out of control and she turns everyone in town to jell-o... Then she leaves them in this state for THREE YEARS and some even get pieces missing when she turns them back. Yet another one rips off Five Nights of Freddy as the Cattanooga Cats (now creepy animatronics) diner only admits parents with children, so Yogi pays Shag Rugg to pretend to be his son, only to get into argument and fight killer robots. Yet another has Shag, Yakky and Auggie pretend to be an adult with the old "three kids in a trenchcoat" method, but get mistaken for a lawyer and elected mayor, in the process letting a murderer go free and destroying half the town. Yet another has Jabberjaw constantly knock out Magilla to give him amnesia so he accepts her radical redesigns to his shops, almost destroying his memory and identity by the end.
A recurring theme as you notice, is characters being selfish, amoral and downright evil and usually, not learning their lessons. The show also has way too many disgusting scenes for a kids show, which it was advertised as, the last episode and Huckleberry's farts were the crowning achievement in this regard.
I can handle adult comedy with classic characters - Harvey Birdman is a show I love and often rewatch. But that show was, y'know, actually funny, and the characters were (exaggerated) versions of their own selves. This feels like Superman: Brainiac Attacks. I am watching familiar characters who look similar to the originals, but behave and act nothing like them.
If this was its own thing, I would maybe give this a 3-4, it would still be unfunny. Given how it shamelessly uses an existing IPs of a half a century old studio though, which is still beloved by many? I give this a 1. Avoid at all costs.
Jiang Ziya (2020)
In the immortal words of Krusty the Clown, what the heck was that???
I couldn't spoil this movie if I wanted to, since I still have no bloody idea what the heck it was even about.
It looks beautiful, yes, sure, great animation, amazing effects, cool battle scenes. But never once do we get any explanation for this "three worlds", who these gods are, what has the Nine Tailed Fox lady done to warrant her execution, why is she bound to some girl... Why are there weird demon creatures, gods and humans all inhabiting this world, yet everyone is afraid of the girl because she has fox ears? We seen a girl with bunny ears a minute ago. I guess that isn't a problem?
I get the message is that justice must prevail and our hero basically powers up super saiyan mode to solve every problem like a deus ex machina (literally)... But why and how this happened, who this guy even was? Who knows.
This movie feels like I should have taken some classes in chinese mythology and read a lot of books just to understand what it was supposed to be about, as the movie seemingly assumes we all know this stuff. Imagine if you were thrown into Star Wars but nobody ever explained who Jedi knights were, what the Empire is, that Darth Vader used to be a Jedi who betrayed his master? It would feel like that.