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PART 8: i cry out in my coffin as the worms begin their feast We open today’s clip with Lady X making a speech to the remaining inhabitants of the store, promising to send “all undesirables where they belong – the expiration station.”   For no reason, we interrupt her speech to cut to Fat Lady… she’s chewing a leg of ham, not really eating it, just scattering bits of meat around her in a perfect circle. There’s also a pink superhero koala bear we’ve never seen before standing behind her. After finishing her meal(?), Fat Lady belches continuously for four seconds, which feels much longer than it sounds, but blames the koala for it, summoning Brand X thugs to drag him to the supermarket concentration camp. New scene, as the camera tracks down the street towards the Copabanana, and we hear pounding military drums and a painfully auto-tuned voice singing: “Hear the drums of battle ring like thunder in the night.” Drums don’t ring. Drums pound. Bells ring. I’m trying to think of some witty or informative way of articulating that, and I’m at a total loss.  The perpetrators of this lyrical stupidity are California Raisins, who are singing for the assembled ikes as they prepare for battle. There’s a shot of the Polar Penguin marching into the club backed by the French Cheese Guy, and the Hairless Hamsters, and Doctor Nose – it’s supposed to be affecting, as we watch the characters we’ve come to love heroically step up and offer to risk their lives, and it falls flat because the ones the filmmakers chose to spotlight here are among the most irritating and poorly designed in the entire film. …well, among the top ten most irritating, at least. Maybe top twenty. The Hairless Hamsters (who I just realized, with their matching kimonos and vaguely Asiatic bickering, are intended to be ethnic stereotypes) the Hairless Hamsters are definitely up there, as is Polar: “Reporting fer duty as in-stucted by my friend, Dex Dogtective! How’d it get to be so cold, though?” Fetish Nazi barges into the club with a gang of Brand X goons, and demands the assembled icons pledge allegiance to Brand X, leading his troops in the Brand X theme song and commanding the other characters sing along. Cheese Guy is the first to refuse, and jumps three times his own height to fart in Fetish Nazi’s face: “I shoot my steenk at you, you big weenie-like loos-err!” In an out-of-character moment, Fetish Nazi reacts to this not with arousal but by threatening him with a cheese grater.  Things look grim until Dex appears. “Play it!” he shouts.   What follows is an lengthy homage to a scene in Casablanca where the house band performs “La Marseillaise” over a group of singing Nazis, which the internet informs me was itself a reference to a similar scene set in a POW camp in the earlier La Grande Illusion. I appreciate this scene. I appreciate it because although it’s stupid, and it makes no sense unless you’re familiar with Casablanca, nothing of significance happens so there’s nothing I have to comment on. Well, French Cheese Guy does the worm, and Mrs. Butterworth’s bottle weirdly distorts as she marches in place, but otherwise there’s nothing. Nazi Fetish Lizard backs off, threatening to return and “pulverize” the remaining ikes, which wouldn’t be noteworthy except the voicework here makes it clear he’s deeply aroused by that possibility. Now we cut back and forth between scenes Lady X and her lieutenants preparing for battle, and Dex making an inspirational speech to his own troops. Here we get our first glimpse of Twinkie the Kid, another mascot prominently featured on the film’s DVD case, standing silent among the crowd in the club. We only hear the last bit of Dex’s master plan: “We’ll need all the aluminum foil in the store. And that, my friends, is one stop shopping.” The battle lines are drawn. There’s a short bit with Lady X and Dex looking back and forth at one another through binoculars, making Lady X’s eyes look huge, which is so dull and lifeless in its animation I’m not certain if it’s supposed to be a sight gag (we do get a blinking sound effect. Comedy?). Brand X marches down an alleyway and starts to scale the building where Dex is standing. “Here goes,” Dex says to a package of raisins, and we get a sparkle sound effect and a brief image of a semi-translucent Sunshine Goodness waving her arms in an vaguely encouraging manner. Then he gives the signal: “Food! Fight!”   And what do you know? It was a trap! Brand X is surrounded now, and Dex’s army readies food items to chuck down at them from the surrounding rooftops. Before they can begin the assault, Dex demands that marshmallows be added to the hot chocolate they’re preparing to spill, because hot chocolate always needs marshmallows, even when useld like boiling oil to be poured on the heads of fascists. The mugs are manned by a quartet of cows, using the purple rear end-cow’s model and Shitweasel’s texture, successfully combining traits from two of the most hideous characters in the film.  The ikes’ ordinance consists mostly of fruit and baked goods, which allows the animators to bring in, you guessed it, more poorly animated goop effects. What follows is a two-minute sequence featuring no less than thirty-six identical explosions of goop, with watermelons and ice cream sundaes bursting upon impact into blobs distinguishable only by color and texture, and nearly as many shots of Brand X soldiers being hurled towards the screen. There are a few weird or ugly bits here, like Mrs. Butterworth’s pancakes exploding the exact same way as every other tossed object, and the Nose Doctor sneezing on the enemy troops. And again, after an object explodes, it immediately vanishes, leaving the alleyway totally spotless after the battle.  Brand X retreats. But what do you know, the ike army has cut them off with a barricade of spatula-catapults, loaded with extremely small pies. More goop explosions (twenty four more!), and more characters being hurled towards the camera!  “Fools!” Lady X cries, “I’ll destroy them all!” An armada of tanks, armed with whip-cream missiles and bottles of ketchup held by exaggerated cartoon gloves, approaches our heroes. They’re backed up by previously-unseen Brand X troops wielding pea shooters. What terrible effects will these new weapons produce?  More exploding goop! Twenty seven more exploding goop effects, with shots of characters tossed back towards the camera! And then, astonishingly, actual fiery explosions (from the ketchup cannons, because ketchup explodes on contact), which means I don’t have to tally them! Not all is lost, as our heroes stomp on packets of ketchup, returning fire with three exploding goop effects of their own.  But Lady X commands: “Whip them! Whip them bad!” (You can hear Eva Longaria’s voice trail off into total apathy as she says this line.) Brand X launches whipped cream missiles trailing embarrassingly pixilated clouds. There’s at least a frame or two when the screen is totally obscured by white and grey pixels, with nothing else visible. Thankfully the missiles also produce actual explosions, not globs of goop, so I don’t have to count the loving things, but be prepared for another dozen shots of characters thrown at the camera.    And then we get what is, without question, the worst shot in the film. “Run while you can, Dex Dogtective,” Lady X says, “for soon you’ll be sitting up and begging for mercy. X-obites, fly!” And then she puts her heel up on the railing of the balcony, for reasons that only become clear in the next shot: it allows the director to frame the flight of the X-obites with her crotch and the underside of her leg, so that it looks like the X-obites are flying out of her vagina.  With any other movie I’d give the filmmakers enough credit to assume this was an accident, that maybe several animation bits were put together at the last minute after it was too late to change anything. Not here. Not Foodfight! There is no doubt in my mind this was deliberate. This is it. This is the single worst shot in this film. We cut to Dex, again, sending a squadron of flying ikes to disable the enemy X-obytes with bubblegum. There’s a wingless alien(?) character we’ve never seen before, and what may or may not be Mr. Owl from those old Tootsie Pop commercials, appearing and disappearing from one shot to the next. It’s just that it’s difficult to care, after what we’ve just seen. I’m still kind of stunned.  But the ike air squadron, undeterred, flies to out to confront Lady X’s swarm of flying mechanical pubic lice. Only Dan expresses doubt, and as he flies in we have a few shots of him performing a sequence of hilariously unlikely and totally unrelated actions in his plane’s cockpit: he takes a bubblebath, he tries to hypnotize himself, he meditates. I think the idea is he’s trying to relax himself before going into battle? But then why is he taking a bath? Anyway there’s chewing gum, bursting bubbles, even more exploding goop.    In another inexplicable moment, General X dances in a circle and sings: “Pudding and strudel is what I think about, that and myself.” Then he orders Brand X’s previously unseen cucumber missile launchers to fire. As they detonate, yet another bunch of characters fly towards the screen, and for some reason it’s this particular round of tumbling is what convinces Dex to finally order a retreat.  And with that, we’ve made it past the one-hour mark, as well as the titular Foodfight! This post was one of the longest, but it would have been muvh longer were the battle not so maddeningly repetitive. It was among the easiest scenes to comment on, but one of the most annoying to watch; this is because it isn’t a series of unique failures, just the same failure repeated again and again. But I promise this will change in our next installment, where fresh horrors await. APPEARANCES BY ACTUAL LICENSED MASCOTS: None (I'm not counting the could-be-Mr-Owl.) (11 total) GROTESQUE SEXUAL REFERENCES: 2 (13 total) EXPLODING GOOP EFFECTS: Approximately ninety-four. (So 105 total) EXCEPTIONALLY TERRIBLE ELEMENTS SO FAR: “It warms my heart how much you love my raisins, tough guy!” Mr. Clipboard’s voice and animation “Perhaps you desire a companion for those, heh heh, lonely bachelor nights?” Brand X are literal Nazis The racist voicework on “But I, Kung Tofu, am innocent!” repeated at 27:20 and 34:50 “All violators will be punished. I do so hope there are violators. I love a good violation. I love anything to do with violation.” Lady X’s genital X-obyte discharge
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Aug 5, 2014 00:19
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Indie Rocktopus posted:Things look grim until Dex appears. “Play it!” he shouts. For the record: this is the scene that made me physically angry the first time I saw it.
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Aug 5, 2014 00:29
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Evil Mastermind posted:For the record: this is the scene that made me physically angry the first time I saw it. Yeah, especially considering that the scene in Casablanca was cast with actual refugees who had been kicked out of their homes due to the Nazi occupation, and it becomes this amazing display of human dignity in the face of overwhelming evil. Then this movie rips it off to make fart jokes.
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Aug 5, 2014 01:10
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Crappy Jack posted:Yeah, especially considering that the scene in Casablanca was cast with actual refugees who had been kicked out of their homes due to the Nazi occupation, and it becomes this amazing display of human dignity in the face of overwhelming evil. And that is the exact reason I was pissed. It's such an important moment in both the narrative and in real life, and this piece of poo poo film had the balls to rip it off. 
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Aug 5, 2014 01:16
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This movie is ugly on both the outside, and the inside
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Aug 5, 2014 01:26
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Evil Mastermind posted:It's like The Room of animated movies; you just watch it and wonder if the people who worked on this had ever actually seen a movie before. I find it hard to compare it to The Room because despite its far-from-competent execution, reading The Disaster Artist you could tell that Wiseau was absolutely passionate and intent into making a great movie. It doesn't excuse most of his behaviour towards people or the whole art of filmmaking, but you could tell there was something endearingly sincere about him. There's nothing like that with Foodfight. Everything was made on a corporate capitalism mentality to monetize on whatever it was they wanted to create, using the laziest reference-style writing and buzzwords, and hiring a bunch of celebs just because. There is absolutely nothing to respect when it comes to Foodfight.
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Aug 5, 2014 03:03
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The Saddest Rhino posted:I find it hard to compare it to The Room because despite its far-from-competent execution, reading The Disaster Artist you could tell that Wiseau was absolutely passionate and intent into making a great movie. It doesn't excuse most of his behaviour towards people or the whole art of filmmaking, but you could tell there was something endearingly sincere about him. The crazy thing is that going off of articles like this the movie was very much driven by Kasanoff's "vision" and they didn't actually get paid for the product placement. Frankly it would be comforting if the whole thing was just a shallow cynical cash-in.
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Aug 5, 2014 04:13
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...of SCIENCE! posted:Frankly it would be comforting if the whole thing was just a shallow cynical cash-in. The Springtime for Hitler of animated movies.
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Aug 5, 2014 05:24
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Indie Rocktopus posted:And with that, we’ve made it past the one-hour mark, as well as the titular Foodfight! This post was one of the longest, but it would have been muvh longer were the battle not so maddeningly repetitive. It was among the easiest scenes to comment on, but one of the most annoying to watch; this is because it isn’t a series of unique failures, just the same failure repeated again and again. But I promise this will change in our next installment, where fresh horrors await. I just want to make sure to highlight this, as it's something about the movie that I only realized after I finished watching and I was still recovering from all the Nazi imagery. The big fight between the ikes and Brand X happens with a half-hour of runtime still left in the movie. If you were to divide the movie into three acts, the third act is the entire last half of the movie. 
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Aug 5, 2014 05:30
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(Note: This post was originally going to have a wall of CG films that came out between 2000-2010 with release dates, box office, reception, etc. But I deleted it because it seemed too much. So, some of this post might read strange because of that.) If Foodfight had made its intended 2002-2003 release, it might have done okay. Pixar-quality story and graphics was still seen as some uniquely magical talent only they had, but despite that there was still a novelty and attraction to CG for audiences, maybe in part because there were so few of them. I mean, this is the Jimmy Neutron movie trailer for 2001: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_685ay2R3bo Not well-aged graphically or animation-wise, but at the time was probably extremely acceptable and still managed to make over $80M in the US on a reported $30M budget. Ice Age made nearly $200M in the US. At the time, the projected $25-$50M budget of the pre-2004 production restart could have maybe honestly believed they'd have a profitable box office take and marketing tie-ins. Even a release by 2003 or 2004 might have still given it a shot at some success. If it had gotten a 2005, 06, or 07 release, I think it gets more grim for Foodfight not only with all the oversaturation in CG theatrical releases, but the number of promotional tie-in those productions would have been taking away from Foodfight. But I think a key factor might also be what the original production could have/should have/would have been like vs. the post-break-in production. I'm not going to lie, a few of the things in the early trailer looks roughly like a less polished Jimmy Neutron, but some things still look horrible. All the humanoid characters still look horrible, shitweasel still looks horrible, but then you get some of the Dex stuff that look pretty good and Chester Cheetah which similarly looks good, too, and might have been more an early rendering to show off to investors and build interest and might have improved during development.
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Aug 5, 2014 06:32
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I watched about five minutes of Foodfight. The gag with the giant robot hands having to slap the bottom of the ketchup bottles before firing them was actually fairly clever, but the rest...  The colour saturation alone almost made me throw up.
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Aug 5, 2014 15:28
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...of SCIENCE! posted:The crazy thing is that going off of articles like this the movie was very much driven by Kasanoff's "vision" and they didn't actually get paid for the product placement. Frankly it would be comforting if the whole thing was just a shallow cynical cash-in. Are you telling me that this man made this film with all these grocery mascots WITHOUT being funded by them for making essentially an animated advert for them?! Buh...
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Aug 5, 2014 15:30
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PART 9: the tower portends cataclysmic destruction but the death card signifies change “Maybe I shouldn’t oughta have eaten that last donut,” says Mob Moose, stuck in a manhole, “food goes right to my butt.” “It’s okay, Maximillius,” Dex responds, “being able to do fun things like eating donuts is what we’re fighting for!” Charlie Sheen sounds a little lost when he reads that. I’m not sure what to make of it myself. Is it the film’s subtext is explicitly made text, a deliberate and shameless equating of American capitalist consumerism with the fight against fascism? Or is it just one more stupid line no one really thought through? Mob Moose is stuck in a manhole because the next stage of Dex’s plan requires someone to sneak through the sewers into enemy territory. Moose was clearly not the right man for the job; we need someone with the flexibility of a contortionist, a total lack of shame, and with the ability to successfully blend into his surroundings as he travels down a river of human feces. Who does that sound like?  “Ah, slither and slime? It would appear you are in need of a professional.” Dex reluctantly accepts Shitweasel’s offer of help, which actually sounds genuine: “It is a far, far butter thing I do than I have ever done before,” he says. As a reward for Shitweasel selflessly volunteering to risk his life on this unsanitary and possibly suicidal mission, Mob Moose contemptuously kicks his rear end into the sewer, sending up another geyser of goop.  The soundtrack starts up with another autotuned battle anthem celebrating the courage of our heroes. Above, they’re proceeding with the second part of Dex’s plan, building lightning rods from tin foil (in characteristic shapes – Fart Frog makes a toilet, Gay Count Chocula builds a statue of Daredevil Dan, etc.) on the roofs of friendly buildings. There are a few problems with this sequence. First, they didn’t actually animate anyone sculpting the tinfoil, just some flailing arms with a cloud of dust to indicate rapid motion that eventually generates a statue.    And second, this isn’t actually how lightning rods work. You need a wire from the rod running into the ground, to conduct the electricity away from the building. If you build a pointy metal thing on top of the building, you’re just making it more likely that it will be struck by lightning. Meanwhile, in Brand X territory, Hairy Fox (remember him?) is having a crisis of conscience over ceding power to Lady X, and after a heated argument leaves to join the resistance - but he won't actually appear again until the final scene, so it doesn't really matter. On the streets bellow, the Brand X drum corps march on ike territory. Fifty strong, they carry what appear to be jelly donuts (or bagels, maybe?) instead of drums, and pound them to send out fifty identical blasts of purple goop to bombard the grocery army. Once more, icons are thrown towards the screen.    (Incidentally, that character on the far right in the last shot is a terrier wearing a Sherlock Holmes outfit. You may have noticed him before in crowd scenes over the course of the film. Which begs the question: why make a background character with no lines a dog detective when your protagonist is Dex Dogtective, and then never comment on it or do anything with it? My best guess is that the character is either a mentor character for Dex cut from the script, or an early alternate model for Dex himself, and in the animators' desperation to fill crowd scenes with as many unique characters as possible they dredged up his model.) Anyway, Polar Penguin is on the front lines, and manages to chuck a cupcake maybe a yard and a half. Dex screams at him to get back to the nightclub, but he’s too late; out of nowhere an X-obyte descends from the sky and impales Polar with its stinger. Dex reaches him just in time for a nunironic big “NOOOOOO!”  General X taunts Dex over Polar’s death, which infuriates Dex (“No one puts Polar in the freezer”) to the point of attacking the General with his label gun (“I’m marking you down, shrimptoast!”, which Google informs me is actually a thing).  “No!” the General cries out, “I was just following orders!” (jesus christ what the gently caress is wrong with these screenwriters) Although quoting the Nuremberg defense may be the most blatant and tasteless of the film’s Nazi references, General X is actually denied a fair trial as our Judge, Jury and Executioner Dex Dogtective signals for him to be crushed beneath a rolling can of delicious Dinty Moore™ Beef Stew. In the face of immanent death, the General explains the Lady promised him surgery to make him tall and thin – “Then you finally got your wish,” Dex quips, and then winks at the pancaked corpse of General X, which the animators forgot to actually make taller and thinner, killing the joke.  Dex looks ruefully up at the Brand X tower: “I’m gonna pop your corn, lady.” “Roll over, Dogtective,” Lady X snaps back at him, after hearing this threat from the top of a skyscraper several miles away.  Then it's into the Copabanana, serving as a makeshift infirmary, as your favorite characters drop dead left and right. Dex lays the dying Polar on a table, and we learn the funereal shrouds that dead characters have been draped under for the entire film are actually Kleenex. “Use the whole box, Polar would have liked it that way,” Dex says, adding another riff on the stupid “cold penguin” joke as he stands over the dead body of a character we were supposed to care about. Well, at least we don’t have to listen to that stupid lithping penguin again, right? (Hah, as if Foodfight! would allow a character to experience significant tragedy or loss that isn’t reversed by the film’s end. Uh, spoilers.) Doctor Nose, however, runs in to announce an important discovery: the X-obytes are killing the ikes with a mysterious “de-servative” chemical that causes any form of merchandise to instantly degrade, spoil, rot, crumble, etc. Doc, of course, is panicking: “Snot happens! This is a big booger we’re bouncing into, even!” Dex demands the Doctor find an antidote. To death. Find an antidote to death, to be used on people who already died. Gay Count Chocula bursts in to tell Dex they’ve finished the (intrinsically flawed, lightning-attracting) lightning rods, and are ready to move to the next stage of the plan. I thought they finished that like ten minutes ago, during the musical sequence, but whatever. Again, Larry Miller does his best with inane, rambling dialogue, but he’s undermined here by some particularly creepy distorting of the character’s eyes by the animators. We’re still waiting on Shitweasel, so in the interim Dan and Dex come up with a new, dangerous plan to take out the X-obytes with an aerial strike on their refueling station (which, despite evidence suggesting so earlier in the film, is not located inside Lady X’s crotch). Dan’s convinced the plan is suicide. But Dex still has a death wish, and is inspired by another semi-translucent vision of Sunshine Goodness pouting at the camera and swinging her hips.  “Like Sunshine used to say,” Dex says, “when in doubt, just do the right thing, and you can’t go wrong.” This is not what Sunshine actually used to say. The line was: “When in doubt, just do the right thing, and it will always turn out.” It’s right there in the script, goddamnit. It’s not enough that Foodfight! is filled with awkward, unfunny references to Casablanca and other classic films; it can’t even reference itself correctly. There’s an attempt at a teary heart-to-heart between Dex and Dan, punctuated by some spinning and arm-waving by Dan, and repeated explosions our heroes recoil from even though they’re at least a mile away in the background. But Dan is convinced: “Let’s win this sucka!” And with that, our two protagonists stride together into the film’s third act.  APPEARANCES BY ACTUAL LICENSED MASCOTS: None (I’m not counting that Dinty Moore™ soup can) (11 total) GROTESQUE SEXUAL REFERENCES: None (13 total) EXPLODING GOOP EFFECTS: 52 (So 157 total) EXCEPTIONALLY TERRIBLE ELEMENTS SO FAR: “It warms my heart how much you love my raisins, tough guy!” Mr. Clipboard’s voice and animation “Perhaps you desire a companion for those, heh heh, lonely bachelor nights?” Brand X are literal Nazis ("I was only following orders!") The racist voicework on “But I, Kung Tofu, am innocent!” repeated at 27:20 and 34:50 “All violators will be punished. I do so hope there are violators. I love a good violation. I love anything to do with violation.” Lady X’s genital X-obyte discharge
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Aug 5, 2014 16:13
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Indie Rocktopus posted:(Incidentally, that character on the far right in the last shot is a terrier wearing a Sherlock Holmes outfit. You may have noticed him before in crowd scenes over the course of the film. Which begs the question: why make a background character with no lines a dog detective when your protagonist is Dex Dogtective, and then never comment on it or do anything with it? My best guess is that the character is either a mentor character for Dex cut from the script, or an early alternate model for Dex himself, and in the animators' desperation to fill crowd scenes with as many unique characters as possible they dredged up his model.) I know this is fanfic as hell, but you know what? Just out and out ripping off Toy Story struck me that it could have maybe been better for Foodfight. Have the plot be about icons becoming outdated and replaced by fresher, hipper versions. It gives an excuse to show off some conflict, feature a bunch of the famous mascots sort of being characters and showing just how darn great they are compared to their potential replacements, etc. "Kids don't know who Sherlock is, anymore. They want an action dog, an Indiana Jones of dogs! Sunshine Raisins doesn't test well with boys because 'girls are yucky', so we're going to put a shriveled up lizard soldier on the box because boys react well well to gross and combat imagery. Kung Tofu's dragon is maybe imposing to the market, let's replace him with a fluffy rabbit or something." You get that conflict period where both items on on the shelves for a while in a test market and it becomes more petty antics rather than out and out war. Then, if you want, a 'happy ending' where consumers or something end up reacting poorly to shallow Poochie-like updates and they get shuffled off to become mascots for non-food items like women's deodorant and bandaids. That, or a man walks into the offices of a food company and the movie ends with him going, "I have an idea for these failed food icons of yours... Have you considered putting them into a computer animated movie?" (Cut to credits) JediTalentAgent fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Aug 5, 2014 |
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Aug 5, 2014 19:42
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Some posters here have suggested that Food Fight COULD have done better IF... I play this game myself some times, trying to analyze bad movies or video games and try to find out how they could have been much better with only a few stupid decisions left out. Bee Movie could have been a much better movie had the creators known the first thing about bees, or at least had been consistent. Shark Tale could have been much better if they had focused on the shark mafia. Food Fight is unsalvageable. The entire premise is just too flawed. If it had been animated like the original trailer, been released in 1999 and you had taken away all the innuendo and nazi imagery, it would still be terrible. As long as it's a movie were the protagonists are marketing mascots used to shill unhealthy food to children you're on a wrong track.
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Aug 5, 2014 20:16
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kjetting posted:As long as it's a movie were the protagonists are marketing mascots used to shill unhealthy food to children you're on a wrong track.     The sad thing is that Foodfight!'s consumerism isn't especially egregious, it's just more forthright about it. That and it's a lot easier to overlook Fix-It Felix escaping from Nesquiksand with the help of Laffy Taffy or the entirety of The Lego Movie because they're genuinely good movies that just happen to feature products.
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Aug 5, 2014 23:09
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kjetting posted:Food Fight is unsalvageable. The entire premise is just too flawed. If it had been animated like the original trailer, been released in 1999 and you had taken away all the innuendo and nazi imagery, it would still be terrible. As long as it's a movie were the protagonists are marketing mascots used to shill unhealthy food to children you're on a wrong track. Here's my pitch: there's no product placement and no actual mascots. Foodfight! takes place in a small, family-owned, healthy, organic and gluten-free grocery. A huge Brand X chain supermarket moves in next door, with its own brand of comically awful-sounding junk food (deep-fried chocolate-covered cheesey bacon) at dirt-cheap prices. The little shop's mascots go to battle against Brand X, and of course eventually triumph over the forces of darkness. Moral: support local small businesses and eat healthy food. Of course, at this point you're basically making a different film. As Kjetting pointed out, there's so much wrong with both Foodfight's premise and execution that you'd basically have to start from scratch to make it work. Thankfully, our own adventure into the depths of Foodfight!'s wrongness is almost over. PART 10: the blindness is no mercy for the memories endure We follow our heroes’ resolution to keep fighting in the face of overwhelming odds with a shot of a Wonderbread truck. We’re deep in Brand X territory again, and Shitweasel has finally arrived to complete his mission. After checking to see if the coast is clear with unlikely equipment, the Weasel emerges from the sewer, pulls a chainsaw from his shirt and chops through the electric transformer on a nearby telephone pole. Predictably, the pole starts to tip over in his direction, and we get another Weasel one-liner: “Agony, she is like my loyal beloved.”   But wait! It’s the jilted Nazi Fat Lady, still broken-hearted by Daredevil Dan’s cruel flirtation and subsequent rejection. Evidently, being desperate for someone to gently caress her was a central element of her character, as it’s a big part of the her final scene. “You got loyal beloved? I want your loyal beloved!” she cries, threatening Shitweasel with an axe. “Allow me to introduce you,” Shitweasel quips, shoving her in the way of the falling telephone pole.  Electricity shoots from the felled telephone pole up the Brand X headquarters, setting off a very ominous looking lightning storm. Shitweasel finally has his moment of triumph, and with one last poo poo-being grin he springs offstage, never to be seen again.   With that, Dex Dogtective’s idiotic master plan is finally revealed in its entirety, as explained to Fart Frog and confused members of the audience by the Mob Moose. Apparently, knocking down a single telephone pole near the Brand X headquarters set off a massive citywide electrical storm. Fortunately, the ikes’ territory is protected by their tinfoil sculpture lightning rods, which cause lightning strikes to bounce harmlessly off the roofs of their buildings. This is how electric wiring, weather and lightning rods work. The comically dense Fart Frog still fails to understand, though, so Mob Moose tells him to “fugeddaboutit.” Meanwhile, Dex is still infiltrating the Brand X X-obyte hanger. He breaks open a pipeline of the “de-servative” chemical, sending it splashing over the X-obytes and destroying them. In a disorienting series of cuts, we then see Dex suddenly at the top of the Brand X tower, then the tower being struck a bolt of lightning, and then Dex once again in Lady X’s penthouse as he cries out: “Sunshine!”  “Dex!” Yes, it’s the long-awaited return of Sunshine Goodness, bound to a chair in the villain’s lair as a good love interest should be. Unfortunately, the passionate scene of tender love-making that was sure to follow their reunion is interrupted by Lady X and the Sex Lizard. Lizard threatens Sunshine with some kind of needle gun doohickey, and the Lady taunts Dex, to which he responds: “I’m not the one who’s going to be puppy-whipped, you cold-farted itch!” I'd like to nominate this as the single worst line in the entire film. "Chip-faced," for instance, while unfunny and inappropriate for children, at least made sense. This one strings three terrible, pointless puns in a row into total incoherence. What is a "cold-farted itch?" What is an itch that farts coldly? As the tower is bombarded by lightning, Lady X leaves the Sex Lizard to execute the two prisoners. But quick-thinking Dex tries the old flap-the-rug trick, tripping Sex Lizard and sending him flying… and yet Sunshine’s chair, sitting in front of Sex Lizard on the same drat rug, doesn’t even wobble. “I thought that only worked in movies!” Dex says, finally checking off the “half-assed self-referential fourth wall joke” box on Foodfight! cliché bingo.  What happens next is a little difficult to follow, so we’ll have to break it down. Sex Lizard loses the needle gun and it goes spinning through the air. Sunshine cries out “Raisins, Dex!”, and tosses one at him with her suddenly unbound hands. Dex jumps sideways through the air in slow-motion, catches the raisin in his mouth, and spits it at the needle gun. And because of the absolutely perfect trajectory and velocity of Dex’s spit-out raisin, the needle gun is knocked back, and stabs Faux Tim Curry Sex Fetish Lizard Nazi in the chest.    “Well, this isn’t very much fun, is it? I think I just wet myself. It feels rather nice…” He collapses with a groan, either dying or achieving orgasm; the film itself is ambiguous, allowing the possibility that Nazi Fetish Lizard could return in tie-in novels or other Foodfight! expanded universe media. Dex unties Sunshine, including her mysteriously re-tied up hands, and the two embrace – although they don’t kiss, now or at any other point in the film, presumably because the animators realized how awkward it would be to mash a dog’s snout into a (mostly) human face. Over the course of her six-month captivity, Sunshine has descended even further into the uncanny valley, and her eyeballs and cheekbones seem to swell and contract as she speaks. Here, enjoy some screenshots:    “I’m here! We’re together!” she says, without looking anywhere near Dex’s face. “My world is whole again, kitten!” he says. “I never stopped believing in you, Dex.” “And I always kept you close to my heart.”  As the two caress one another, visibly struggling to restrain themselves from surrendering to their ravenous animal lust, Dex notices a tattooed “X” on Sunshine’s neck. Aside from another uncomfortable reminder of Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany, this discovery also reveals the origin of Brand X’s mysterious secret ingredient: it was Sunshine’s own “essence,” whatever the hell that means, extracted by needlegun and exploited to diabolical ends. Also, as the camera spins around the happily reunited couple, there’s no sign of Fetish Lizard’s body, which supports my theory that he did not die but in fact experienced orgasmic release and then escaped the tower, as discussed in my fanfiction, after which he  Dex and Sunshine are forced out onto the balcony of the teetering Brand X tower, and although they realize they may perish together Sunshine tells Dex that if a double-decker bus crashes into us to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die, and if a ten-ton truck kills the both of us to die by your side, well the pleasure the privilege is mine. But sadly, the sweet mercy of death evades Dex Dogtective one last time, as Daredevil Dan arrives to save the day. In an improbable twist, Dan will only be able to reach them in time if he successfully performs a loop-de-loop. I invite the reader to imagine a situation – any situation – in which flying a loop-de-loop is more efficient than just flying straight towards the drat thing without zooming around upside-down first.  You may remember that Dan couldn’t do a loop-de-loop before, and has neither successfully performed one nor even practiced in the interim. But now he has Sunshine and Dex telling him to believe in himself, and because the words “believe in yourself” are a magical on-switch for human consciousness that activate all of our latent potential by granting us access to one hundred percent of our brain capacity, Dan successfully flies the loop-de-loop. The day is saved.  But as the triumphant trio nears the ground Sunshine observes… “Something’s wrong. What’s happening?” What’s “wrong” is that Mr. Clipboard’s has invaded the nighttime grocery, stomping all over the place like an epileptic Megazord. At least we finally know what happens if a real human being enters the Marketropolis at night… or do we? APPEARANCES BY ACTUAL LICENSED MASCOTS: None (11 total) GROTESQUE SEXUAL REFERENCES: 1 (14 total) EXPLODING GOOP EFFECTS: None (157 total) EXCEPTIONALLY TERRIBLE ELEMENTS SO FAR: “It warms my heart how much you love my raisins, tough guy!” Mr. Clipboard’s voice and animation “Perhaps you desire a companion for those, heh heh, lonely bachelor nights?” Brand X are literal Nazis ("I was only following orders!") The racist voicework on “But I, Kung Tofu, am innocent!” repeated at 27:20 and 34:50 “All violators will be punished. I do so hope there are violators. I love a good violation. I love anything to do with violation.” Lady X’s genital X-obyte discharge “I’m not the one who’s going to be puppy-whipped, you cold-farted itch!”
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Aug 6, 2014 01:07
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I would have thought that Nazi Sex Lizard's dying words would have qualified as 'exceptionaly terrible', but apparently worse things follow.
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Aug 6, 2014 08:13
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So the weasel's job was literally their entire plan, but they still treated him horribly when he volunteered to do it?
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Aug 6, 2014 08:19
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Thanks for the write-up, I'm enjoying it. I'm a lover of terrible movies but I've never been able to make it all the way through Foodfight!, because of the aforementioned "deadening" badness of it, so I've never actually seen most of this. Knowing the context of everything, it's only slightly less incoherent. Aside from Mr. Clipboard, that loving weasel was the highlight of all the segments I've seen. They actually got some laughs out of me, even if they were laughs of disbelief. You really have to appreciate the absurdity of something that moves like the Thing and looks like a literal log of poo poo squirming around in a "kid's" movie. If the movie had more janky stuff like those two characters and less, uh... general grotesqueness it might have been enjoyably bad like the Room or whatever. As it is, it's so difficult to watch. It's such a genuinely unpleasant movie in every single possible way and the incompetence is just so pervasive. Haha. I know the generic big-eyed art style doesn't help but they really could not have made charliesheendog's Love Interest Catgirl look more like a young teenager, could they?
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Aug 6, 2014 08:54
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PART 11: lay down your sword, child, and step into the gathering dark; for it is gentle, and offers absolution  Mr. Clipboard doesn’t get the chance to cause much trouble. Mob Moose and Chiquita Banana lady trip him with a line of dental floss, which seems much easier than it should be for a pair of three-inch-tall creatures, but there’s ten minutes left in the movie and I don’t care any more. And, as is revealed, there was always more to Mr. Clipboard than we knew, and there was actually a plot-based reason for his spastic animation.  Mr. Clipboard was a robot suit, piloted by Lady X the whole time! The revelations fly thick and fast here, as do the nonsense sex jokes. Lady X is secretly Priscilla Pustley, of the recalled Priscilla Pustley’s Genetically Giant Prunes; her radically altered appearance is from cosmetic surgery in Brazil. Her entire plot was due to her smoldering hatred of Sunshine Goodness, who consistantly outsold her until her prunes were finally recalled.  “But how did you get in and out of the store?” Dex asks, compelled to spin around mechanically by his befuddlement. “Humans!” Lady X says. “When you look like this you can get them to do anything. Size only counts for men.” We cut to Gay Count Chocula, making goo-goo eyes at Dan again, perhaps in an attempt to distract us from the insanity of Lady X’s explanation, which fails. Questions must be asked: Aren’t ikes never supposed to be seen by humans? How did she get to Brazil in the first place, before the surgery, when she was still ugly? And what exactly did she… how did she, with the humans… it’s just not worth it. However, I stumbled across one theory I enjoyed, which claimed Lady X’s mysterious surgeons were actually exiled Nazi scientists, and her minions are all Boys From Brazil failed Hitler clones. “But enough about me! Let’s kill you!” Lady X squeals, and starts beating on Dex. Before we conclude the plot, I want to quickly draw attention to the guy on the far left, just hanging out in the background of the shot. Just take a good look at him.  Anyway, Mob Moose explains that Dex would never hit a woman. Dan is baffled that his friend won’t defend himself, and then he asks “are those melons real?” which is of course followed by Lady X pelting Dex with actual melons she produced from nowhere – I suppose this joke is at least tangentially related to the scene, with the recent revelation of Lady X’s cosmetic surgery, but that doesn’t excuse it. Also mute Mr. Clean gets hit by one, which means more exploding goop that vanishes by the next shot.  “But I will!” says Sunshine Goodness, reminding us of her admirable qualities as a Sassy and Independent Female Protagonist who spent eighty percent of the film’s runtime tied to a chair. “The bimbo’s mine! Get ready Lady, cause I’m gonna kick you where the sun don’t shine!” They fight, with Tekken-quality motion-capture and animation, and there’s a particularly unsettling bit where Sunshine launches a flurry of punches at X’s face and she remains totally expressionless as she gets knocked around. Finally, Sunshine winds up a big knockout punch…    And Lady X is “chip-slapped back to ugly,” as Daredevil Dan puts it; apparently the force of Sunshine Goodness’ Critical Hit was enough to undo her plastic surgery, and she reverts to Priscilla Pustley. The model of Priscilla’s hideous aged form (with separately modeled sagging breasts, of course), crammed into Lady X’s latex fetish suit, still speaking with Eva Longaria’s sultry voice as she pleads for her life, is more dissonant and even pathetic than menacing. Not that our heroes care. “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a spam,” Dex says, and asks Dan to drag her off the expiration station – the concentration camp analog where X herself sent undesirables. One imagines their conversation as he escorts her to the gas chambers would be particularly uncomfortable. “Hey, remember that time I tried to gently caress you? Crazy times, huh? Of course, that was when you were hot, now that you’re ugly I don’t want to gently caress you anymore, obviously. Anyway we’re here! Enjoy your ‘capi-tomato-al punishment,’ bitch!’” Hairy Fox shows up, and our heroes are remarkably forgiving of him for collaborating with the Nazis until it was too late to matter. “A quick come-down and a shot of toodilly-pip!” he says, for reasons I cannot divine. Then Doctor Nose comes back with an antidote for the “de-servative” toxin: “It will bring all the dead ikes back to life!” It’s the specific phrasing here that makes this unsettling. If the toxin had sent the ikes into a coma, or infected them with a life-threatening illness, then this would be a satisfactory resolution to that plot. But allowing Doc Nose to resurrect the worthy dead, Christ-like, is a step too far.  But we pan over to the corpse of Polar Penguin, which was apparently sprawled over a chair just offscreen the whole time. Doc sprays him with the Jesus Elixir, and Polar pops back to life (What happens to an ike’s product if that ike dies then returns to life?).  “We saved each other,” Dex tells the assembled ikes in wake of the climactic catfight, “because the secret is inside – inside all of us!” And then Dex (framed by giant advertisements for Shitweasel and the Hairless Hamsters’ products, as well as a sign reading “Requiem for a Whipped Cream,” probably supposed to be a movie poster but it’s just the words on an orange background out of context) Dex finally proposes to Sunshine.  She accepts of course, and once again straddles him without kissing him, because that would be gross.  So we cut to the Copabanana, where Dex stomps on a carton of milk and embraces Sunshine without kissing her. Dex is wearing his Casablanca outfit, and Sunshine isn’t even granted the dignity of a change of clothes after being held hostage for months. The crowd cheers, and the camera pulls back to reveal a rabbi in the background officiating the wedding.  “Dex is Jewish?” Doctor Nose asks. “Yeah, kosher,” Daredevil Dan says. “Soy-vey! Who knew?” says Kung Tofu, the racist tofu dragon, who you will recall spoke only twice before in the film, repeating the same recording of the same line.  And with that, we finally- Oh. Oh wait. “Here on the bright side / everything’s right side / the secret is inside,” the soundtrack shrieks, and we get some mid-credit scenes. The first of these is Sunshine trying to take off Dex’s hat, only to find another hat underneath – I guess Dex never removing his hat was supposed to be a running gag that was never implemented (also, we’ve seen him change back and forth from his Indiana Jones hat to his Casablanca hat several times). Then Mob Moose and Fart Frog fall sobbing into one another’s arms. The Hamsters return to start smacking each other around. You might be worried that these concluding vignettes would just be a chance for us to say goodbye to the characters, without any insinuations of loving. You’ll be happy to hear this isn’t the case. Zombie Polar Penguin finds a sexy lady penguin and they nose-kiss, although Polar complains he’s still cold after, possibly because he is an undead abomination pulled from his crypt by dark science and incapable of love.  Then Chiquita Banana Person and resurrected French Cheese Guy lock eyes. “You really cut the cheese on that Lieutenant X?” she asks, clearly smitten. “Oui, but that was just the Muenster. I was ready to cut loose ze Limburger.” “You got flow,” she says, “you got style. Bueno hombre.” She takes his hand, and they leave the reception together, and from everything we’ve seen in this film there is no reason to believe they aren’t going to go gently caress each other’s brains out.   Also, Gay Count Chocula solicits the chocolate cows, but falls on his rear end as he approaches them. You would think, like the rest of our heroes, he’d be rewarded for his bravery with sex, and we would fade out on him with the implication that he was about to have a three-way with these obese chocolate monsters. Sorry, GCC. But the final bit, the absolute last shot of the film, is Daredevil Dan bragging about his exploits to a trio of utterly enthralled human women. including the previously unresponsive Sweet Cakes. “Gimme some sugar, sugars,” he says, and they lean in to kiss him. This is the last image of the film, the last time we’ll ever see any of these characters, after spending an hour and half in their world: Daredevil Dan the chocolate squirrel, surrounded by fawning women, anticipating a four-player round of “lick the icing.”  That is what Foodfight! leaves us with. That really says it all, doesn’t it? Not really, actually, because no single image from the film could ever effectively encapsulate the complexity and totality of Foodfight!’s failure. But it’s close enough. So the ordeal is finally over. I have gutted this atrocious thing, I have discerned hidden knowledge from the arrangement of its entrails. Understand: the secret was inside. It’s my world now, Foodfight!. It’s my life. I set down the knife. And I am free. APPEARANCES BY ACTUAL LICENSED MASCOTS: None (So in the end, I counted 11 licensed mascot characters over the course of the film, which was first announced to contain 80. I understand that there were a few I couldn't find, in crowd scenes or the background of shots - although frankly, if I still haven’t noticed your character with all the times I’ve seen this movie, I don’t give a spam.) GROTESQUE SEXUAL REFERENCES: 3 (17 total) (This is a very conservative figure, because I didn’t count jokes if I thought they were ambiguous. “Grotesque” is the key word here.) EXPLODING GOOP EFFECTS: 2 (Approximately 159 total) (jesus christ) FINAL LIST OF EXCEPTIONALLY TERRIBLE ELEMENTS: “It warms my heart how much you love my raisins, tough guy!” Mr. Clipboard’s voice and animation “Perhaps you desire a companion for those, heh heh, lonely bachelor nights?” Brand X are literal Nazis ("I was only following orders!") The racist voicework on “But I, Kung Tofu, am innocent!” repeated at 27:20 and 34:50 “All violators will be punished. I do so hope there are violators. I love a good violation. I love anything to do with violation.” Lady X’s genital X-obyte discharge “I’m not the one who’s going to be puppy-whipped, you cold-farted itch!”
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Aug 6, 2014 15:30
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I'm actually impressed by the shipping montage, because who knew that after all this bullshit, you'd discover you still had a wee bit of barf left over in your system for emergencies?
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Aug 6, 2014 15:47
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The two best parts of the "catfight" are the moose spending a good 30 second to say "the boss wouldn't hit a girl, no way no how" over and over to make sure we get that the boss wouldn't hit a girl no way no how, and how none of the punches actually connect.
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Aug 6, 2014 16:27
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Epilogue: What can we learn from Foodfight!? Nothing. We can learn nothing from Foodfight! I've always thought one of the most important functions of criticism is to help us learn from others' mistakes. As previous posters have mentioned, one of the reasons I enjoyed the earlier commentaries here is that they identified elements of terrible films that actually worked, as well as analyzing and attempting to correct the bigger problems that sunk the film. Viewed through this lens, Bee Movie reveals its creator's ego, and shows what happens when a narrative totally abandons character, plot and continuity for one-liners (especially terrible one-liners). Shark Tale is a case study in what makes a character sympathetic or unsympathetic to the audience. If you're a creative person, it can be helpful to think about this stuff, so you can try to avoid it in your own work. Foodfight! has nothing to teach us. The concept is so ill-conceived, and the execution so half-assed, that there aren't actually any mistakes to learn from. "Don't design a character who looks like a log of poo poo," "don't fill a children's film with explicit sex jokes and imagery," "don't include disrespectful Holocaust references." This is all self-evident, these are ideas you need to be a terrible artist and human being to even conceive of, let alone include in your work. Add that to the shameless greed, corruption and waste of its decade-long production, and you get something exceptional. The story of Foodfight! is almost mythological: it's a morality play, a fable about what happens when ugly people with ugly ideas use ugly jokes and ugly production to tell an ugly story. It's a little presumptuous to declare any one piece of media the absolute worst, especially when some of its repulsiveness comes from knowing the circumstances of its production, and not problems with the film itself. But taking both content and context into account, I'm willing to call Foodfight! without question the worst film I've ever seen. And if someone more qualified than I am wanted to argue that it's the worst movie of all time, I wouldn't disagree. If I've achieved anything here, it's that I have become absolutely loving sick to death of Foodfight!, to the point I doubt I'll ever need to see it again. Maybe I've done the same for some of you, or even dissuaded you from watching it in the first place. If so, I consider this time well spent.
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Aug 6, 2014 19:10
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Palette-swapped characters taking up 3/4 of a frame in a $65 million movie. In light of everything else, this shouldn't bother me as much as it does. But it does.
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Aug 6, 2014 20:33
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Congratulations Rocktopus for reviewing the worst animated movie I have ever seen, it makes movies like Delgo look like a work of art, Mars needs moms a masterpiece in motion picture and all those Land before time sequels as classics to be fond of in comparison. There is nothing redeeming about this movie and I find it hard to believe someone would steal hard drives from it.
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Aug 6, 2014 22:29
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Why does Lady X works for Brand X when Brand X is the one that recalled her?
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Aug 6, 2014 23:04
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Das Boo posted:Palette-swapped characters taking up 3/4 of a frame in a $65 million movie. Wow, they're even wearing the same palette swapped outfit. While on the subject, here's a pretty thorough analysis of the character design in this movie. http://penguinreferences.tumblr.com/post/85739759493/five-lessons-about-character-design-how-foodfight
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Aug 7, 2014 00:01
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So why was it OK for Dex to stomp on that milk, but it was akin to babymurders when Mr Clipboard stomped a bag of crisps?
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Aug 7, 2014 00:35
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Das Boo posted:Palette-swapped characters taking up 3/4 of a frame in a $65 million movie. I dunno, the biggest animated film of the last year-ish starred two characters who were palette-swaps above the neck!
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Aug 7, 2014 04:12
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DoctorWhat posted:I dunno, the biggest animated film of the last year-ish starred two characters who were palette-swaps above the neck! Not this stupid thing. And no, they weren't.
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Aug 7, 2014 04:15
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DoctorWhat posted:I dunno, the biggest animated film of the last year-ish starred two characters who were palette-swaps above the neck! Wasn't one of the biggest films of THIS year The Lego Movie, where (nearly) every character is just a palette-swap?
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Aug 7, 2014 04:23
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I'm sorry, I just like starting poo poo sometimes. I really don't care about the Disney Sameface thing.
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Aug 7, 2014 05:41
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What movie are you even referring to?
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Aug 7, 2014 06:23
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Obvious hes talking about popular palette-swap film Planes 2
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Aug 7, 2014 07:00
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The Saddest Rhino posted:What movie are you even referring to? He's referring to Frozen. I'm not saying the two characters are the most visually interesting, but they don't look the same. There was a dumb tumblr picture I saw where they had like 10 pictures of Anna and Elsa and some Rapunzel thrown in, from just above the neck, and black and white. And it was like CAN YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE, YEAH I DIDN'T THINK SO. Except you could easily tell who was who because they still had distinct faces.
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Aug 7, 2014 13:45
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Aug 7, 2014 16:33
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While Foodfight might seem like the absolute nadir of animated feeatures, I still hope this thread will live on. There's still a whole lot of movies in the quality dead zone. This one seems promising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a20oRLJ4v4s Known mostly for being Sean Connerys comeback 10 years after the atrocious League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and for the creators being really mad with Disney's Brave getting all the attention, Sir Billi has a 0% score at Rotten Tomatoes with five reviews. It's comparable to Foodfight by spending most of their budget on a big name lead actor and the production spanning several years.
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Aug 7, 2014 22:12
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kjetting posted:While Foodfight might seem like the absolute nadir of animated feeatures, I still hope this thread will live on. Oh sweet jeebus yes. I highly recommend reading Nathan Rabin's review; it seems to have even more in common with FoodFight than you might expect. Nathan Rabin posted:Guardian Of The Highlands goes nuts with James Bond and Indiana Jones references, sometimes simultaneously, as when a zaftig female supporting player says, apropos of nothing, “Forget Indiana Jones, I should be called Jemima Bond!” But it also includes a nuclear submarine, à la The Hunt For Red October, solely so Connery’s Sir Billi can look at the camera and quip, “Oh my, that sub reminds me of another adventure.” Nathan Rabin posted:Billi is aided in his heroic quest by his animal friends, as well as a pair of American women whose sole defining features are enormous breasts just barely concealed by their skin-tight tops. These women vamp their way through a film-ending musical sequence awash in horrifically unnecessary sexuality, which concludes with the bustiest and most fetching of the lasses heading off with Sir Billi, ostensibly to Pound Town, one of the sauciest subsections of the Highlands. In case anyone misses the suggestion, Sir Billi’s daughter directly addresses the camera to talk about how glad she is that her heroic dad has found someone, particularly someone with such “an enviable chest.” Guardian Of The Highlands spent years in production, debuting as a 30-minute short in 2006, yet at no point did the filmmakers discern that a family film probably shouldn’t end with the protagonist’s daughter talking about the amazing set of tits on her father’s date for the evening. I mean, what the hell is this.
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Aug 7, 2014 23:22
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kjetting posted:While Foodfight might seem like the absolute nadir of animated feeatures, I still hope this thread will live on. Sir Billi finally getting released was almost as surprising as Foodfight! hitting DVD, it was kicked around for years and even changed titles in the US (here they released it as Guardian of the Highlands) but somehow they finally pushed it out the door. The fact that its existence (and Sean Connery's involvement) is more or less entirely due to a nationalistic push to promote the Scottish animation industry just adds to the madness. Even though Scotland is still a small nation by most standards, other countries that exist outside of the animation mainstream have managed to make decent-looking movies; Antonio Banderas was similarly involved in Spain's animated films like The Missing Lynx and they have completely passable low-budget animation, The Secret of Kells was an Irish film that looked amazing, and France has been churning out amazing stuff like Sylvain Chomet's works and Ernest and Celestine. Even if you leave Eurasia entirely, South American countries like Argentina have been putting out stuff like The Ark/El Arca that easily out-performs Sit Billie. Even if it's not completely fair to compare a nation of 5 million people to ones ten times its size, when you're competing on the global market it is inevitably who you're going to be compared to. Rather than promoting their animation industry it just makes them look even worse by comparison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGG5EcgtCuA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMPhHTtKZ8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyU-mSUOnSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoymdAWdj_8
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Aug 8, 2014 00:52
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