The trailers have filled me with dread. My instant feeling upon witnessing this travesty is.... STRAIGHT TO VIDEO. It wasn't just that I was seeing the trailer with THE PRINCE OF EGYPT... it wasn't the 16 steps backwards style of animation.... It was the terrible voice characterizations, it was the character designs... I decided to not see the film based on the trailer... which is something that very rarely happens with me. NIGHT AT THE ROXBURY being my most recent, "couldn't drag me kicking and screaming to see" movie. But... I figure... let's see what someone who saw the whole film had to say... and well... here it is... And upon reading it I wish Warners would have the good sense to release this straight to video. If it really is this bad, then all it can do is further damage the reputation of WARNER ANIMATION, though they didn't do it, and possibly hurt what seems to be a gigantic animation hit on the horizon... THE IRON GIANT. So please... think this through.

Always wish I had something to share with Aint-It-Cool, & this is probably it:

The horror, the horror… I went to an advance screening over the weekend of the new animated feature not really based on the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical "The King & I." In all honesty, I was expecting this film to be a disappointment - but not the jaw-dropping monstrosity I wound up sitting through. Harry, this film is a compendium of everything that can go wrong & be done wrong in a project like this, when the powers-that-be try to ape Disney without the budget - or talent: ugly character designs coupled with embarrassingly cheap & rushed-looking animation, characters lacking ANY sort of personality onscreen, a clunky screenplay constantly pushing them through hoops for no particular reason except to keep the story in frantic motion, an excess of excessively cute animal sidekicks… oh, and a jaw-droppingly racist caricature of a sidekick, complete with Cholly-Chan dialect, serving as the Jafar-knockoff villain's inept henchman.

Apart from the decent song performances & orchestrations & the basic premise of Anna whatsername coming to Siam to teach the King's children, this film has NOTHING to do with the original film or Broadway musical. Instead, it's been rebuilt around a horribly cliched, off the shelf plot about the King's evil prime minister plotting to seize power, along with a subplot about the King's eldest son daring to fall in love with a servant girl.

Be prepared for moment after moment of ghastliness: Anna strutting around the deck of a storm-tossed, sea serpent-attacked ship, "whistle(ing) a happy tune so no one will suspect" she's afraid (the aghast sailor watching her looks more terrified by her perkiness than the monster attacking the boat!), the computer animated elements (demon statues come to stalking life, a British military ship) that completely fail to mesh into the look or texture of the rest of the film, meager handfuls of thickly-outlined, blocky & under-animated characters not quite-filling sparsely-detailed background scenes, etc. etc. etc…

The King (never given a name) is introduced almost entirely as an afterthought about 15 minutes into the film (after the sea-serpent attack & numerous scenes with the villain), & never gets beyond a few posing & strutting moments. What might have been interesting - the conflict between his fascination with modern technology vs. his desire for his society's ancient traditions to go on undisturbed - is never explored (having never seen the Yul Brynner movie of the original musical, I've no idea if they made any more of it); instead, the film just switches gears between them as suits its convenience.

The young-love subplot is equally thin; little details - like the servant girl's name, or the important plot point that she's unaware her boyfriend is the crown prince - are never underlined early on & as a result seem to come out of left field when they're resurface later in the film. The supposed growing romance between the King & Anna is likewise left almost entirely to the viewer's imagination, with just a few repetitive scenes of them trying to one-up each other standing in for their relationship.

The animal sidekicks (li'l mischievous monkey, cute 1-tusk-broken baby elephant & the King's should-be-cool-but-just-another-wuss black panther) don't miss an opportunity to pummel the "so-solly" henchman with ripe fruit at every appearance, until you wind up sick of them & feeling sorry for this guy. (I have to admit the 5-year olds in the audience seemed to eat up this slapstick.) Interestingly enough, this guy gets off the film's few funny lines (probably ad-libs during the recording sessions, like after his boss pushes him around for the zillionth time: "oh sure, pick on the funny-looking little fat guy!"), if you can overlook the stereotyping. I'm not talking PC versus non-PC here either, folks; the look & behavior of this guy harkens back to the WWII-era "Japanazi rat" villains in the Fleischer Superman cartoons or "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips."

The villain's last appearance, with his fed-up henchman stomping on him in a pile of elephant manure, neatly sums up the film's sense of taste & subtlety. Although the film was directed by Disney vet Richard Rich (responsible for "The Black Cauldron," the studio's post-Walt, pre-Eisner nadir), most of the physical animation seems to have taken place in Korea - and India (first time I've ever seen a credit for an Indian animation studio - not even on TV animation), and it looks it, to everyone's discredit. Someone was seriously deluded - or lying - if they thought this thing was going to be even remotely in the same league as Disney's cheapest direct to HV animated features. Instead of doing something fresh and original with a classic American musical score, they've created a classic botch job. As a whole, the film is too juvenile to hold an adult audience & too inept to keep the kids interested. (As good as the songs sound, the animation & visual storytelling backing them up is simply not particularly interesting; also, somehow I don't think the "Rugrats" crowd - the only age group that would sit through this thing - is clamoring to hear 50 year old Broadway show tunes.)

In fact, if there's any reason Disney switched their "Doug" feature from direct-to-video to a theatrical release later this month (1 week before/after "King & I," I forget which), it's probably because they see what a sitting duck this film is. Wouldn't you know it's coming from Warner Bros, which seems determined to keep putting out 4th rate Disney knock-offs ("Quest for Camelot," anyone?) & shameless merchandising vehicles (Bugs as Michael Jordan's stooge? Sure, why not?) instead of playing to their (superhero) strengths. Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'll watch my video of "Cats Don't Dance" again, & remind myself what a REAL Hollywood musical - animated or otherwise - is supposed to look like...