adebannery The Swan Princess when it was released on 18 November 1994 was the worst films ever made and was a box office bomb but now is considered a classic. The real box office bomb is the 1999 version of The King and I an animation family adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's great musical. The Swan Princess is a classic animation film for the whole family!(C) Swan Princess Partners LLC1994

iamyourlife I have always passed up the offers of watching The Swan Princess because I had the impression that it was a cheap Disney rip-off of inferior quality. I have also avoided other animated films, such as Anastasia, for the same reason. Recently I became unemployed so had more free time and on a whim I decided to watch Anastasia, expecting it to be a cheese fest which would leave me cringing and rolling my eyes. Car crash TV if you will, which I was in the mood for at the time. To my surprise I absolutely loved it. Well, it is clearly not one of the best movies of all time, but I can't deny that it is one of my favourite animated movies. Which brings me to The Swan Princess: my surprise at enjoying Anastasia so much encouraged me to give this movie a go. I regret this decision.The animation is sub-par. Honestly, you'd think they could have made it look a little less like a My Little Pony episode and more of the quality of their main competitors, Disney. Now don't get me wrong, I wasn't looking for animation of say Aladdin quality. Anastasia's animation isn't that good either after all, and that didn't affect my enjoyment. In this case though it really is just like a cheap cartoon which in turn makes me feel like I'm watching something aimed solely at little children rather than an animated movie for all ages (such as Disney movies or indeed Anastasia, which I feel I'm starting to gush about).The songs are awful. No joke. Again to use Anastasia as a comparison: A's songs aren't the best, but they are more mature I guess. I don't mean lyrically, I mean in sound and indeed in how they are performed. SP's opening song is abysmal. "This isn't my idea of fun" indeed. Using a song for a montage showing time passing is a fine idea, but the song needs to be decent and well..the singers should have decent voices too. The kids singing these parts were awful. For an example of how to do that type of scene right, see Do You Want To Build A Snowman? from Disney's most recent release, Frozen. I would continue but there's only so many ways I can say that the songs suck.The story. Oh I could accept this story maybe if the animation and music were better. It is one cliché after another, with one boring cardboard cut out character after another. I didn't like either Odette or Derek for various reasons, in Derek's case he's just a class A pillock and I found myself rooting against him. Odette is just boring, no wonder he only liked her for her looks. "What else is there?" is a fair question when you consider who she actually is. A pretty face. Allegedly anyway, she's not the best looking animated character I've ever seen. But I digress. The villain was also stupid and made no sense. He wanted to take over the kingdom but refused to just take it, even though the king was dead and his heir had vanished?! No, he wanted to do it legally by marrying Odette. Stupidest villain I can think of, he didn't deserve the kingdom by that point. At least other villains have decent plans! All in all, I was so disappointed by this movie. I'm not sure if it is aimed at a wide audience or solely at children, but in my opinion if they were attempting a movie which would appeal to a wide range of age groups, they certainly misfired on this one. I cannot see what this movie has which would appeal to anyone over the age of 8. Disney it most certainly is not. And there I was thinking Disney try-hards couldn't get worse than Thumbelina!

Jackson Booth-Millard This was one of those cartoons I had heard about so many times, and I knew at least one of the actors doing a voice in it, I knew it wasn't going to be Disney standard quality of animation or storytelling, but I was still willing to try it, from director Richard Rich (The Fox and the Hound, The Black Cauldron). Basically Princess Odette (Michelle Nicastro) and Prince Derek (Howard McGillin) were forced by their parents as children to many summers together in the hope they that they would grow become close and eventually fall in love, they hates each other, but as adults they may finally to develop mutual attraction, but after a little offence he causes she is not sure he truly loves her for more than just her beauty. Years ago vengeful sorcerer Lord Rothbart (Jack Palance) was banished from the kingdom for attempting to cast evil spells and take the kingdom for himself, but he has returned to take revenge, disguised as the "Great Creature" he can turn into he manages to kidnap Odette, and fatally wounds her father King William (Dakin Matthews), Derek vows to train himself to kill the beast that killed the king and save the life of his true love. While Derek's training goes on and believing that the princess is still alive for him to save and convince of his love, Odette has had a curse placed on her by the evil enchanter, at his castle lair on Swan Lake she will turn into a swan in the daylight, and if she does not to return to the water when the moonlight shines she will not temporarily turn human for the night time, Rothbart will only lift the curse if she agrees to marry him so he can legally take the kingdom, she continues to refuse. While cursed Odette makes friends with friendly tortoise Speed (Steven Wright), frog Jean- Bob (John Cleese) who believes he is also cursed and if kissed will become a human prince, and the puffin bird named Puffin (Steve Vinovich), they sympathise with her wanting to return to the kingdom as a human and be with her true love, Derek refuses to let her mother Queen Uberta (Sandy Duncan) make him marry someone unless he truly loves them. Prince Derek does eventually find Odette as the swan, but he wrongly assumes she is the Great Creature, but he does see her turn temporarily human at night, but she is trapped by Rothbart before she can make any escape and stop the proposed bride seeking and potential wedding ceremony for the prince, and with the evil sorcerer disguised as the princess he hopes to make the prince express his true love to the fake, therefore allowing him to take the kingdom. In the end Rothbart in the form of the Great Creature is defeated by Derek firing the one arrow through his heart, the swan curse of Odette is lifted, and the couple finally embrace their true love for each other, marry, unite the kingdom and the two families and they all live happily ever after. Also starring Liz Callaway as Princess Odette (singing voice), Mark Harelik as Lord Rogers, James Arrington as Chamberlain, Davis Gaines as Chamberlain (singing voice), Joel McKinnon Miller as Bromley and Brian Nissen as the Narrator. You can tell by the animation style that this film was a rather low budget, the story does have it's fair share of predictable and cheesy moments, and most of the songs are lame, but the voice casting is chosen well enough, Palance making a good villain, and Cleese and Wright adding the needed comic relief, I suppose it will entertain most of the family, not a bad animated musical fairytale. It was nominated the Golden Globe for Best Original Song for "Far Longer than Forever". Worth watching!

Ly Jasmine I have seen so many animated movies from different studios and I must say I'm a huge fan of this genre. But this is obviously the worst I've ever seen. Poor script and visual directing, awful sound effect and character voicing, no artistic elements, and not to mention terrible music... This movie came out in 1994 and I can see that at that time Disney was at the top of the animated film market and was the only studio to have had a long history of making this type of film, while others were just beginning, this may partly explain why New Line Cinema did a terrible job on this movie. But seriously, Richard Rich, the director, had had directed a few movies for Disney before and they're good ones, not this bad!I gave this movie 3 stars out of 10 because that's all I think it deserves.