Charming Review

Animation fans stories about classic fairy tail characters isn't new heck Disney one of the most famous animation studios is built on adapting classic fairy tails into animated films but something that is very rarely done is an animated film that features multiple fairy tail characters and now there is a film out there that has that exact set up and here is my review of that film which is called Charming.

The plot of this movie is Prince Charming must go on a quest to find out who his true love is it's either Cinderella , Sleeping Beauty , Snow White or his travelling companion Lenore. If you read this summery then you'll know the entire story it's painfully obvious who it is that gets the happy ending in this film heck I worked it out just from watching the trailer I do give the film makers credit for doing an original story with these characters but when your ending is so predictable it really does seem pointless to actually watch the film.

Now I actually stuck around to the end credits and I saw that some famous voice actors worked on this movie with the likes of Tom Kenny , Tara Strong , Dee Bradley Baker , Carlos Alazraqui and Jim Cummings all lending there talents to this indie film but not only that but Grey Griffin also did some temporary voice work for the film as well. How in the living heck could a film this predictable get such great voice actors to play characters is beyond me i'm pretty sure that the makers of this film had something on each of them and that was how they got them involved.

Speaking of the actors starring in this film was Dee Bradley Baker as a bird , Wilmer Valderrama as Prince Charming , Demi Lovato as Lenore , Sia as Oracle , High School Musical star turned producer Ashley Tisdale as Cinderella , singer we all secretly loved in our teenage years but now don't care about Avril Lavigne as Snow White , G.E.M. as Sleeping Beauty , Nia Vardalos as Nemeny Neverwish and somebody who is clearly slumming it and two good for this movie John Cleese as Fairy Godmother / Executioner. I think you can make out what I thought of certain actors just by how I described them because John Cleese is the best actor in this movie end of story and he's not even in it that much , Avril is decent but she's clearly not an actress as for the rest there just meh altho I will admit Ashley Tisdale did get a few laughs out of me.

The animation for the film was done by Cinesite Animation who also worked on The Star and Gnome Alone but the film was produced by Vanguard Animation who's credits also include Gnome Alone along with Space Chimps 1 and 2 and Valiant. I'm listing of some of the credits for these studios because in all honesty for a film that only cost $20 million to make the animation isn't as bad as you'd think it would be don't get me wrong there are times where the characters look plastic but they are few and far between.

One of the biggest concerns that I personally had going into the film was how they would handle Cinderella , Snow and Sleeping Beauty just by the plot summery I was wondering how they would play into the story since they could have either made them really dumb or air-headed or they could have made them really evil.  Thankfully tho they didn't go with either they instead make them out to be like the mean popular girls from every high school movie or at least that's how I see it and i'm not sure how I feel about that since it could be both a good and bad thing good because it's radically different from say there Disney counterparts but bad because it's so radically different from there Disney counterparts that they might as well be different characters.

What is to me a big problem is outside of a few appearances here and there there's no need to have Snow , Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty in this film at all I honestly gave this alot of thought while watching it and if you took those three out of the main story you wouldn't lose that much in terms of plot you could have had there roles be filled by three random people and the results would still have been the same they really add nothing to the story and in my opinion were only put in so they could say they have fairy tail characters in the film and that was it.

If you havn't heard of this film trust me your not the only one because the release of this film has been pushed around so much stateside and it's out in Spain with UK and European release dates to come soon but oddly enough if you look on the Wikipedia for the film listed under distributor is Netflix so one has to wonder if this film will in due cause find it's way on to the streaming service because there is a trailer out there on various Youtube channels.

Let's take a second to talk about Lenore what can I say about her without giving anything away well she might seem like she's going against the princess type but when you really get down to it because she's going against the typical princess trope she is now following a trope because every princess movie has to have the main female character go against what has come before them so here if they wanted to do something different with her they would have stuck to those older tropes since that would be something different they also should have made her an interesting character.

This film is so set about doing things different that half of the time it forgets to make the characters interesting while I will admit that what they did with Prince Charming is interesting he as a character isn't because we don't really get to know that much about him and the same goes for alot of the characters in this film we don't know much about them so when they do something different and new it doesn't mean anything because we don't know these characters.

If you want songs written by talented people in a kinds film and nothing else then this is the film for you because this film has songs written by Sia and the lead singer of Fall Out Boy and yes this film is also a musical for some unknown reason but I will admit that the song by the lead singer of Fall Out Boy called "Trophy Boy" isn't a bad song and it's not badly sung either but that's because the people singing it are actual singers the rest of the songs including the two by Sia just don't really add anything to the film.

Now I touched on this very briefly when I mentioned the actors but while some of the jokes are amusing alot of them are jokes that we've seen before and done better in other projects would it really kill studios to come up with fresh jokes instead of just rehashing ones that we've seen hundreds of times in the past jokes are meant to catch you off guard so it doesn't help when you can see the punchline coming because you've seen the set up done hundreds of times.

Overall this isn't a bad kids film in fact I think they will find it rather enjoyable however there are other and better films out there that they should be watching since this film is very by the book so with al of that in mind this film gets a score of 5.5 out of 10 from me.