The Worst CGI Kid Films In Recent Memory

[mr3urious]

Then again, not all of their CGI non-Pixar films did that well. Surely, their earlier attempts weren't massive successes (except for Dinosaur, the worst of the bunch), but even Tangled did only so so. Around the same level as Princess and the Frog.

Didn't help that it was over twice the budget, either.

 

[Drtooth]

Tangled was screwed all along the way. It was almost an unspeakably horrible movie involving time travel. I remember seeing the test footage on Youtube... It's even worse than the Black Friday Toy Story reel! Then they had to market the movie so it appealed to boys, leading all the trailers to say "Shrek Knockoff several years late" when it wasn't.

Still, I'd love to add that Jim Carrey Christmas Carol abomination to this list. I mean, we have plenty of Christmas Carols of various levels of accuracy that didn't need to wiggle around and try to poke you in the eyes in 3-D. But the film looked absolutely unappealing, and this was on the downslide of Jim's Career. Like when the very mention of his name was going to screw the film (poor, poor Burt Wonderstone, where he was actually good in, but got Wolverine Publicity). I really think that was the film that should have killed Zemeckis's Mo-Cap Nightmare Machine, and not one film more. Seriously. That thing (outside of Monster House) sucked. How come Tintin looked vibrant and colorful and all those movies looked like poorly puppeteered corpses?

At least we were spared Yellow Submarine... witness the horror Here, if you dare.

 

[mr3urious]

Tangled was screwed all along the way. It was almost an unspeakably horrible movie involving time travel. I remember seeing the test footage on Youtube... It's even worse than the Black Friday Toy Story reel! Then they had to market the movie so it appealed to boys, leading all the trailers to say "Shrek Knockoff several years late" when it wasn't.

Either way, I'm glad it didn't become a Shrek knockoff in the end.

 

[Luke kun]

I'm very happy about those shorts. It's just that they've been struggling for a 2-D feature and hitched their trailers to films that were doomed to not do too well. Princess and the Frog went under heavy scrutiny because everything about it was either too racial or not racial enough. Even then it's a princess movie, so you're going to lose the male audience anyway. I mean, that's why Frozen's such a big deal. It managed to cross the boundary. And not having a Dreamworks film to compete with it didn't hurt. As I've said before, they could have given Princess and the Frog a decent November opening, but no, they needed to put that horrible Mo-Cap Christmas Carol in a prime spot, leaving the Princess to have most of her audience taken away by the subpar second Chipmunks film.

And what happened to Winnie the Pooh was a shame, but also their own fault. It was supposed to relaunch a franchise that turned into yet another CGI Dora clone. The one where they're super heroes that solve mysteries with not Christopher Robin, like A.A. Milne totally envisioned. :eyeroll: And what's mostly disturbing is that after that movie, they completely shut out Winnie the Pooh. Remember, this is the same company who in the 90's milked the heck out of that cash cow. You couldn't punt a football without hitting Tigger somewhere, and you couldn't so much as find Mickey Mouse at a Disney Store! WOW! That's...that's a bad turn of events, right there.

Then again, not all of their CGI non-Pixar films did that well. Surely, their earlier attempts weren't massive successes (except for Dinosaur, the worst of the bunch), but even Tangled did only so so. Around the same level as Princess and the Frog.

What about Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby? That's still popular, too!

 

[mimitchi33]

I've been reading reviews of the new SpongeBob movie, and guess what? The CGI is only the last 20 minutes of the film, meaning that the trailer lied just to gross more money. I read a thread yesterday saying that the success of this film may mean that 2D films and animation can be widely accepted. I in particular mentioned Equestria Girls being successful in it's limited release with sold-out showings and mentioned the potential of the Japanese anime Yo-Kai Watch (which is similar to Pokemon and is about a boy and a watch that can find monsters that cause problems), which has a movie that beat many Japanese box office records, and is now set to outgross Stand By Me Doraemon (which was a CGI film). Others mentioned that Disney might get back to doing 2D with this film's success, as well as other companies.

And I believe there's still a lot of possiblities CGI can do. For example, look at this test short for Popeye by the same guy that made Hotel Transylvania;

That looks promising and really adorable!
And here's the CGI Doraemon movie I was talking about earlier. And no, this isn't really the last Doraemon movie-they have a superhero adventure one coming out.

 

[mr3urious]

That's some gorgeous CGI in that Doraemon movie. It makes use of realistic textures and lighting while keeping the characters appropriately cartoonish and not uncanny valley creepy, which is important when translating 2D characters into 3D.

 

[Drtooth]

I've been reading reviews of the new SpongeBob movie, and guess what? The CGI is only the last 20 minutes of the film, meaning that the trailer lied just to gross more money. I read a thread yesterday saying that the success of this film may mean that 2D films and animation can be widely accepted. I in particular mentioned Equestria Girls being successful in it's limited release with sold-out showings and mentioned the potential of the Japanese anime Yo-Kai Watch (which is similar to Pokemon and is about a boy and a watch that can find monsters that cause problems), which has a movie that beat many Japanese box office records, and is now set to outgross Stand By Me Doraemon (which was a CGI film). Others mentioned that Disney might get back to doing 2D with this film's success, as well as other companies.

Couple things.

There is by no means anything wrong with Spongebob's CGI sequence being short. Especially if you paid to see it in 3-D, where the 2-D animation looked marvelous. Absolutely gorgeous. There's a sequence where Sandy went insane and it has very Ren and Stimpy-esque animation in her facial expressions... my Glob, it was magnificient. Worth the price of admission there. Not selling the CGI stuff short, as it's very well done and retains the bounciness of the characters. That stuff was indeed intended to sell tickets and push the 3-D gimmick, no doubt. How else do you expect to get kids who can watch the same characters regularly with just a paid cable subscription to want to go to the theaters?

Equestria Girls was never meant for anything past home video. I'm sure they had some children's cinema at 10 Am type deal going, but that doesn't even in the slightest count. I'm sure a feature length proper movie released all over in theaters would do some money, especially if, like Spongebob, they use the same animation studios to keep the costs down. It would be refreshing as a Hasbro property to not be a huge, loud, 20 something intended blockbuster. Yet, I doubt Hasbro would bother with a film similar to Transformers the Movie when there's more money in Transformers the live action expensive movie.

As for Yokai Watch, there's nothing different between that and essentially every other Japanese kid's film/animated film/animated film festival. Essentially it's like one of the Pokemon movies. We rarely do that stuff here. Sure, Nick managed to make 2 Spongebobs, 2 Rugrats, a Wild Thornberries, a Rugrats/Wild Thornberries, and a Hey Arnold (the only real money loser of the bunch), essentially making them the most successful and the highest output of the current cartoon based movies with 7. CN, even though PPG made back its budget domestically and lost any international business by refusing to release it theatrically due to not wanting to pay for marketing refuses to ever do one again. Disney had moderate success with Doug and Recess, but Ducktales stopped them from doing any of the then current Disney shows, and the complete ennui of releasing Teacher's Pet (which was freaking awesome, yet completely underrated) completely shuttered any chance of them doing such in the future. Shame, since that Phineas and Ferb 2nd Dimension thing was good enough to get a bigger budget for a theatrical release. Then there's Beavis and Butt-Head, The Simpsons, and South Park, which actually used the higher ratings to their advantage to do more risque jokes. While their popularity gave them a boost, no doubt fans wanted to see what TV couldn't provide.

Not that there haven't historically been some theatrical cartoon movies. They just didn't make huge budgets. Some didn't even have enough material to get through a shorter, 80 minute movie. Ever see A Man Called Flintstone? There's like 10 minutes of spy plot and at least 2 completely useless musical numbers about Pebbles. Totally could have been an episode. Then they tried to get small theatrical cartoons in the 80's. A Heathcliff compilation film, Chipmunks Adventure... small stuff like that.

 

[Harleena]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2279373/?ref_=rvi_tt

Do we need this? Seriously?! Do we really need?!

When? When will this end?!

I saw it with a couple of my friends. We all agreed it was really good. Also, we were the only ones who sang along to the theme song, so we're just in the theater and we're all like

while the little kids in the theater are all like

and the couple in front of us is all like

(Sorry, I wanted to use an EQG picture but all of it was either Flash/Twilight or Sunset/Twilight and didn't really work. The couple was only kissing, though, GEEZ!)

 

[Harleena]

Adagio Dazzle? What's that?

My friend's new favorite MLP character (no seriously, she literally said "Adagio is love, Adagio is life" this morning and has been singing all the Dazzlings' songs)…although I prefer Sunset Shimmer myself.

 

[D'Snowth]

Okay, I can understand DreamWorks bringing in a flavor-of-the-month celeb like Jim Parsons to voice the lead in HOME, but what the frog were they thinking bringing in Rihanna? She's like brain-damaged or something.