Frog Kingdom (2013)

Wow! Such a good movie.

Good movie but grossly overrated

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Everytime my 8 year old decides to watch this, I want to drill a hole into my head. The animation is "meh", clearly dubbed from its original language, and lacks imagination. The voice acting is emotionless, poorly timed, and at times feels like lines were made up for the sake of filling space. The script and story line are repetitive and utterly predictable. The plot goes on without building any secondary characters or plot interest. Everytime it's on, it feels like a 20 minute show that's been stretched into 3 hours. There's not even a morale to the story or lesson to learn. My kids don't have discriminating tastes, but I will say that most of the shows they watch at least try. This is a dumpster fire in action and I can't think of a bigger waste of time.

This movie seemed like it started in the middle. It felt abrupt to me. I watch tons of kid movies with my 2 kids, but I couldn't sit through this one. Besides the questionable acting, the sound was really strange. Maybe it's just the On Demand version from Comcast, but the voice track sounded louder than it should be and like a Prue-edited version. Like when the actors were watching it and recording their parts. The background music was very quiet so the movie seemed oddly quiet at times. It was really distracting. The animation was fine, but I would not pay $5.99 to rent it On Demand again. My kids barely watched it too. It's rare that a straight-to- video movie is very good anyways.

The design and animation looked quite good at first, but then the voice acting is just so bad that it's had to concentrate on anything without cringing. It's like they hired amateurs, you can feel they are reading their text without even looking at the screen, worse, they all sound bored. Like, "I don't care what I'm doing, all I want is the money, let it end as soon as possible." Just another detail: as it deals with frogs in a watery scenery probably, I have been focusing on how the water is rendered from the very beginning, and that very first scene alone was screaming: "We're doing the minimum we can for it to look decent." A total waste of time would be my conclusion.

Positive: Animation quality was good, but not great. Negatives: 1. Most notably the actors chosen for English voice over were both mismatched to their characters and just plain robotic and boring. 2. Dialogue was just as bad; pointless without meaning or feeling and with no direction (conveying storyline/plot convincingly); didn't seem to have a targeted audience in mind either to young viewers or broadly intelligent enough for all ages; the worst was not being synced to the characters mouth movements which turned out to be an irritating distraction. 3. Animation quality as mentioned above was good but it also had the distracting quality of being too much (too misdirecting) in each scene making it difficult to focus on the central character's actions each moment. 4. Nothing creative in the storytelling: the usual princess doesn't want to be married, especially to the many unlikeable suitors; just wants to freely follow her own dreams but then, of course, one suitor is a little different from the rest which could affect her plans. The usual evil adversary to add an antagonist to the story which didn't turn out very believable.