Worst to Best Animated Films of 2020 Part 1

(If you like what you see, you can go to camseyeview.biz to see more of my work on video game reviews, editorials, lists, Kickstarters, developer interviews, and review/talk about animated films. If you would like, consider contributing to my Patreon at patreon.com/camseyeview. It would help support my work, and keeps the website up. Thanks for checking out my work, and I hope you like this review!)

So, 2020 was a stressful and soul-sucking year, wasn’t it? On top of, well, everything else that matters more than what I’m about to write about, the animation scene was a mess in the feature film department. Delays upon delays, and changing release strategies shook everything up. Luckily, animation was a bright spot despite other elements getting in the way, and not only did we get a lot of great movies, but also a lot of incredible shows. Sure, the major studios bowed out of the release windows, but that left room for multiple smaller indie films and streaming features to enter the scene, and overall, it turned out to be a solid year. Maybe not the strongest, but still entertaining enough. Plus, unlike some animation critics, I watched all of the major releases that mattered. Anyway, the rules still apply. They must have had some kind of US release, I tend to stick to if they were released in some way during 2020, and while I am still following the Oscar Submission List, I am moving some of the films to my 2021 list due to the fact they didn’t get proper 2020 releases. Let’s get started. 

38 Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Water Rebus

Honestly, I didn’t want to add this to the list because it almost doesn’t count as animation. It mostly feels like a bunch of live-action footage with multiple filters with the bare minimum of rotoscoping the footage. It doesn’t feel like an animated film, but even if it was more traditionally animated, the plot was hard to follow, and trying to find out what the plot exactly was made my blood boil. Maybe it was a subtitle thing when I saw this at Annecy, but it’s no real shock this film had no chance at the Oscars or most award shows. It’s the exact kind of film that I would categorize as unpleasant to watch and is what I think of when people say they want something as far away from the big studio projects as possible. Well, this is what ya get, a film with such little interest in making sure you know what’s going on that it resulted in an experience I never want to have again. Sadly I do get that kind of experience, but we will get there on this list. 

37 Pets United

I know it’s a cliche to bash Illumination, but you would realize how much talent and work goes into their films if you see a film like Pets United. It’s a weird mishmash of tones, ideas, and it doesn’t work at all. Say what you will about the Secret Life of Pets films, but they were at least fun to watch and kept your interest in some way to make you not forget them. Moments after I watched Pets United, I was forgetting details about the story, the themes, the characters, and so on. Its animation is fine, and some weird aspects stand out for how out-of-place they are, but that’s not enough to call it anything good. It’s one of the films that Netflix picked up because it didn’t cost much to purchase and translate. 

36 Fe@rless 

Shockingly, a Vanguard Animation film wasn’t on the bottom of the list. Honestly, it does deserve it, because while it’s “better” than the previous two films, I wouldn’t call it good. It’s got all of the hallmarks of the studio’s work with a bad story, bland characters, and some decent ideas that are never expanded on or fleshed out. It all feels like a film that only had enough money in the budget for a rough draft and then got dumped onto Netflix with no fanfare. A few amusing lines do not make a good film. Otherwise, it’s just more straight-to-video/straight-to-streaming schlock. 

35 Pokemon Mewtwo Strikes Back: Evolution

Who knew we would get our very own version of 2019’s Lion King, but instead of a bad remake of a good movie, we got a bad remake of a mediocre movie! Yeah, I am not a fan of the original film, and I know many love it due to how every kid saw it back in the day. Still, it’s an ugly CGI remake of a 2D animated film that does the bare minimum of improving the story, and while it might be closer to the original Japanese version of the film, that doesn’t change much due to how it’s already a mediocre story. The CGI Pokemon looked fine, and the voice cast was solid, but there was no real reason for this film to be made. 

34 Latte and the Magic Waterstone

Oh, look, another foreign feature Netflix bought on the cheap and gave no other support for it. Honestly, out of the worst films on the list, it’s harmless. Its most offensive element is that it’s boring and forgettable. It has a few cool moments like this one sequence where a character’s shadow is hand-animated, and some of the moments with certain characters were amusing enough. The biggest offender of this film is that it feels like a feature that was dated in terms of storytelling, themes, and characters. 

33 Henchmen 

It’s a real bummer the lead actor for this film is a garbage bin. I probably shouldn’t have it on there because of the recent news about Thomas Middleditch (on top of the other creepy and awful stories about him), but honestly, no one in this film is good. It’s a situation where the film’s production history is more interesting than the film itself. I mean, an animated superhero comedy written and produced by Adam McKay and Will Ferrell sounds incredible, right? Well, that is not what we got due to them leaving the project early on. Instead, we got a middling superhero parody that has a decent hook, but like most bad parodies, does nothing interesting with the hook. The animation is kind of cool, but it’s nothing incredible or as iconic as what Spider-Verse did with its visual style. It’s a film with a promising elevator pitch, but that’s about it. 

32 Ni No Kuni 

What do you get when you are a film based on a video game? The answer is a film that’s not even remotely familiar to the video games it’s based on. It’s related by name only. While it has a few decent story beats, it plays out like a very generic fantasy film. The only part that is kind of cool is the moments in time where the leads go back and forward between the real world and the fantasy world, but that’s about it. It’s a real disappointing film. 

31 Superman Red Son 

Do you know what my least favorite kind of DC animated film is? It’s the one based on an adaptation that shouldn’t have been one film! While the story of what if Superman was raised in Russia is a compelling one, it’s not given enough time to let the proper story beats play out, and it doesn’t feel as compelling as you would think this premise is. It’s easily one of the most forgettable films from DC’s animation lineup, and that’s a shame. 

30 Dragon Quest: Your Story 

The video game curse strikes again! This is why truncating an entire video games’ story into one movie is a bad idea, and it’s even worse when it’s based on what might be the most popular entry in the biggest RPG franchise in Japan. The CGI animation while better than most, does a few things that irked me. Why do you have Akira Toriyama’s iconic designs, but take out distinct design details that end up making everything look generic? The action and music are quite fantastic, but then the film pulls a plot twist in the last 10 minutes that causes the entire experience to drive off of a cliff. I get what they were trying to do, but maybe don’t try to make your own story when you are based on a story that already existed. 

29 The Last Fiction 

I might not like this film, but boy howdy do I respect and admire how this Iranian animated feature wanted to be this epic that had dark tones, violence, and plenty of action beats. That doesn’t mean I can’t find some things to criticize. The scale of the story is ambitious, but it feels badly paced with huge leaps through time, and characters I found forgettable. The combination of 2D animation and CGI was also something that felt like it was from the early 2000s. Still, there is something to admire about the ambition of this film. Hopefully, we can see some other promising projects from this corner of the world. 

28 Manou the Swift 

Way back in 2017, I reviewed a film called A Stork’s Journey. I considered it one of the weaker films of that year, and I still stand by that. Well, to me, Manou the Swift was what that film wanted to be. While it’s not a marginally better film, it at least has a lot more that I like about it. It has a decent cast including Josh Keaton, Nolan North, Willem Dafoe, and Kate Winslet, the animation was better, and it wasn’t as obnoxious in the comedy department. It still had a lot of the same problems as A Stork’s Journey, but it did just enough better with the story beats to not make this a total borefest. 

Still, the next batch of films on this list are at the very least more interesting, so stay tuned! 

Thanks for reading the review! I hope you all enjoyed reading it! If you would like to support my work, make sure to share it out, and if you want to become a Patreon supporter, then you can go to patreon.com/camseyeview. I will see you all next time!

The Other Side of Animation 180: Pokemon: Mewtwo Strikes Back-Evolution

(If you like what you see, you can go to camseyeview.biz to see more of my work on video game reviews, editorials, lists, Kickstarters, developer interviews, and review/talk about animated films. If you would like, consider contributing to my Patreon at patreon.com/camseyeview. It would help support my work, and keeps the website up. Thanks for checking out my work, and I hope you like this review!)

Well, it took 179 reviews, but I am finally talking about something from the Pokémon franchise. I know that seems a touch nutty that I avoided talking about this franchise for so long, but I wanted to tackle something Pokémon-related when I found a film I wanted to talk about. There are so many films to dig into that it’s a daunting task. I could probably get a good few months of content from just reviewing Pokémon films alone, but that didn’t interest me. If I wanted to talk about Pokémon, I needed a film that had more meat on its bones. That’s why, out of all of the films to talk about, I want to talk about the recent remake, Pokémon: Mewtwo Strikes Back-Evolution.

Directed by Pokémon movie mainstay Kunihiko Yuyama and Motonori Sakakibara, this is Pokemon‘s first foray into CGI theatrical animation by Oriental Light & Magic. It was released last year in July 2019 and finally got a wide release in February 2020. So, did giving the first film in the franchise a CGI remake improve and evolve? Or did it take an Everstone and not evolve or improve one bit?

Well, the story of this remake is, well, the story of the original Pokémon film. I could keep it at that, but that wouldn’t be very professional of me. We follow our original trio of ragtag Pokémon trainers with Ash Ketchum, dubbed this time by Sarah Natochenny, Misty, dubbed by Michele Knotz, and Brock, dubbed by Bill Rogers. After having another fruitful battle, Ash and the gang are invited to an island where the supposed “strongest trainer in the world” lives. If only Ash knew that the trainer in question was Mewtwo, dubbed by Dan Green, a Pokémon that is the clone of the legendary Mew. Once Ash and his friends get to the island and find out about Mewtwo, the cloned Pokémon decides to reveal his plan of destroying the human race and any Pokémon that sides with humans. Can Ash find a way to stop Mewtwo from taking over the world? Will Team Rocket get in the way and maybe steal the film like usual? Did you see the original film?

So, let’s not beat around the bush. This remake is the Lion King 2019 remake of the Japanese animation franchise film scene. Every problem you have had with Disney live-action remakes can essentially be found here with this remake. There is one major difference though to compare this remake to the Disney remakes like The Lion King, this is a worse remake. Listen, I get that this film is super nostalgic for many people. It’s super nostalgic for me! I went to see the original Pokémon film in theaters with my sister when we were young and loved Pokémon as well. However, the film’s story was flawed in its execution, and you can only use so much nostalgia to cover up the plot points that don’t fully work out or are counterproductive to the story’s themes and tone. So, why do I consider this a worse remake than Lion King 2019? Because it doesn’t do anything to improve upon the original. It’s a mediocre remake of a mediocre film. It even ruins some of the original film’s most iconic shots. Sure, you can move the camera around easier in a 3D-dimensional space, but the film looks boring, and it makes you remember how important storyboarding is to the overall execution of scenes. As I said, the story problems don’t get fixed. Mewtwo is still a gullible hypocrite, some of his actions make no sense, the characters say something that is then shot down by a later scene, the film’s morals are contradictive to the main point of the show, the ending is awful because it cuts any stakes or progression in the film had short, and if you are wondering, some characters show up and are never seen again.

So, what about the animation? Well, the CGI used in the film is okay, but it doesn’t look all that good in motion. The Pokémon look great, because of course they do, but the humans do not look good at all. They are stiff, their animation wants to be cartoony, but it’s not fast or snappy enough, and the look of some characters make them look creepy. Ash and Misty look like porcelain dolls from a horror movie. Team Rocket looks great, but obviously, something happened when the translation from 2D to 3D took place, since the iconic Pokémon human designs become hit-and-miss. Okay, what about the dub? That should mean that they are using a script more akin to the original, right? None of that 4Kids tedious dubbing is there, right? Well, yes. The script is definitely missing that 4Kids kind of cheese, but it’s also missing that 4Kids cheese. Say what you will, 4Kids wasn’t a good company, but sometimes, the writers behind Pokémon got away with a few puns and jokes. Sadly, due to some scene changes, the better jokes from the 4Kids dub weren’t there, and were replaced with slightly more annoying jokes. I will say that at least the dubbing is solid stuff. The actors are doing their best, and they even brought back some returning voice actors for the characters. They do fix a few lines that made the original worse.

Pokemon: Mewtwo Strikes Back – Evolution is a frustrating sit, because it does everything a bad remake does, and yet, everyone is just going to overlook it, because they liked the original movie. It’s just as cynical, or in my opinion, way more cynical than the Disney live-action remakes. At the very least, the Disney remakes have their original films to go back to. This film only has the original mediocre film to fall back on, and that’s not a good thing. I can’t say it’s the worst movie I have seen so far this year, but until further notice, it will be listed as the worst one until something else comes in. I know I was hard on this film, but you have to leave childhood nostalgia at the door for these kinds of films. I don’t recommend it, but there is nothing wrong if you find yourself or your kids enjoying this film. It’s easily the most harmless bad movie I have seen this year. It’s just another mediocre Pokémon movie in a series that has quite a few of them. Now then, let’s tackle one more Netflix animated film, and review Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon.

Thanks for reading the review! I hope you all enjoyed reading it! If you would like to support my work, make sure to share it out, and if you want to become a Patreon supporter, then you can go to patreon.com/camseyeview. I will see you all next time!

Rating: Lackluster