An animated fairy-tale adventure that offered much promise but delivered very little upon viewing.
When a village that was once protected by white wolves comes under attack by rogue hyenas, ten-year boy old Savva (Voiced by Milla Jovovich, you read that correctly) must escape and seek help to take back his village and save his mother and their people from slavery. On his journey, Savva finds himself in a strange magical world with an even stranger group of allies; Angee (Will Chase), who isn’t all he seems, Baron Fafl (Geoffrey Cantor) a cursed prince with an arrogance issue, an odd little pink thing called Puffy (Sharon Stone) and a mosquito King (Joe Pesci). All of whom are seeking the same thing, a magician to solve their problems. They band together to travel across the land and fight foes in the form of Jozee (Whoopi Goldberg) and her army of monkeys.
It’s hard to choose the worst part of A Warriors Tail. It feels unfair to be scathing towards director Max Fadeev. This is his debut feature and animated features aren’t easy to crack. It’s also worth noting A Warriors Tail was originally a Russian animation brought over and re-voiced by the current cast. Under the right circumstances, A Warrior’s Tail might have been a success. The character dynamic blueprints were good, but their relationships weren’t executed right. A large part of what made this film bad is the choice of actors, perhaps it flows better as a Russian animation made for Russian voice actors?
A great animation is created around it’s actors. A great animation will use the voice actors’ mannerisms and characteristics to really make it sound and feel like them. Just putting a voice to an already created character isn’t an art, it’s cheap and easy and that’s exactly what you get with A Warriors Tail. It has a poor plot, a terrible choice in casting, often-times blotchy animation and cuts horribly together as it jumps aimlessly from one scene to the next. To put it bluntly, there’s very few redeemable qualities about this ill-judged film. It’s simply lazy in its story telling and, really, the warning signs are always going to be there when Milla Jovovich is voicing a ten-year old boy and Whoopi Goldberg a monkey Queen. Sharon Stone provides the odd laugh in a mostly laughable film. Puffy’s quirky behaviour and a couple of lines between Baron Fafl and Komar the mosquito draw a smile and that’s really about it. The rest of the time you sit in horror and watch, covering your eyes waiting for the cringe to be over. And after an awkward, drawn out, weird slow motion scene which would make Wes Anderson proud, it finally is.
A Warriors Tail hits cinemas briefly on April 1st (take that as you will) though it might be best waiting just 10 days until it’s released on DVD April 11th
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