- Released: July 20 1994
- Directed by: Toshiyuki Hiruma, Takashi
- Running time: 45 min
- Rating 1/5
Synopsis
A lion cub named Tooey bonds with the King of the Jungle named Leo, and the two must work together to release a bunch of animals that have been taken by humans, including Tooey's mother.
My Thoughts
Yep. This is a thing that exists. I was originally trying to find Leo the Lion (2005) to review. The horrible CGI one with the vegetarian lion. The movie I’m reviewing here also Isn’t Leo the Lion, as in, Kimba the White Lion’s translated name. How many products do we need with a lion called Leo, seriously? Is one not enough?
Okay, so, I guess I’m reviewing the 1994 Leo the Lion, then? Yeah. Plot summary:
This was just… a thing. Does it even really classify as a movie? It barely reaches the 40-45 minutes mark. As is the case with a lot of Goodtimes productions I’ve seen. Still, I guess I’ll give my thoughts?
Okay, so, the story is just cliche. It’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen from the start once the mother gets taken by the poachers. It’s going to be a “free the animals from the evil hunters”-story. And of course Tooey, who wanted to call Leo his dad from nearly the first time they met, is going to eventually be adopted by the king. But, hey, at least the mother didn’t die in the first few minutes?
The characters are just very standard and handled quite poorly. Mother lioness is literally just a tool to get the plot moving. She has no personality. She is just “mother” who of course has to be the victim of whatever the plot wants to happen. Tooey himself is just your generic protagonist. He’s honest, loyal, doesn’t give up, brave, confident. I wish there was more to him, but there isn’t. He doesn’t even go through any major developments. He just wants to free his mom, hangs out with the king, and then gets what he wants. Leo the king at least goes through some form of development as he grows closer to Tooey and his subjects again. But the execution… isn’t the best.
The pacing… Good gods, that was dreadful. Since they only have 40 or so minutes to tell this story about growing relationships between characters… it feels awfully fucking rushed. While that’s the case, some shots also hold for way too long, which just created painfully awkward pauses and throws off the pace even more than it already did.
The voice acting was… all right. Just decent. They got Andrea Libman for Tooey, and she does a good enough job. Tooey’s singing voice was provided by Kathleen Barr (who honestly sounded too feminine, rather than young-boyish, but otherwise sounded fine). Leo’s was voiced by Garry Chalk. Honestly, the acting was just basic. Nothing outstanding, but nothing horrible, either.
Now, for the visuals… The animation was… really quite bad. It’s really just Saturday-morning-cartoon type standard. It looks rough, inconsistent and often seems to lack structure. The character designs were okay, but there were some odd things about it (mostly the tails and how long, thin and flexible they were. I know that even The Lion King (which this is obviously trying to copy) has lion tails being more flexible than they really are, but they at least somewhat look like normal lion tails? These just look like ropes that keep twisting and moving really unnaturally. The art style was fine and kinda worked, but some of the animals really didn’t look like what they were supposed to represent. Seriously. Just look at this:
and tell me it looks like an actual hyena. It looks like a fucking wolf with spots. That’s not a hyena. #notmyhyena. It’s just really bland-looking and rather cheap. The backgrounds were all right. Nothing special, but not horrible, either. There’s also quite a few color inconsistencies.
The songs… oh dear souls, the songs. I don’t even want to talk about them. They’re bad. Just take my word for it. Bad. They also messed up the pace of the movie even more and often came right the fuck outta nowhere.
Another thing I finally want to bring up is how the movie ends by just having more clips of the film that were shown previously while the intro song plays over it. The problem with that? There’s literally nothing new being added or shown? It’s just a clip show with some music under it. At first I honestly thought this was supposed to be the credits sequence without any text on it by some mistake, but, nope! The actual credits follow after this random clip show. My only guess is that this is more padding to add some extra minutes to the film. We’re not even at 40 minutes yet when this clip show starts. But it just feels really weird and wonky out of context?
Just a mess. A forgettable mess. It’s not even bad in a way that really stands out, like the 2005 Leo the Lion supposedly is. Maybe I’ll watch that one someday, maybe I won’t.
Overall score:
Don’t bother. Skip it. Most Goodtimes films are of the same quality as this. The only Goodtimes movie I think I actually like is Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer: The Movie (1998). I guess I also have a soft spot for White Fang (1997) but that’s because I have nostalgia for it and because of that alone. It’s still shit as it is.
No comments:
Post a Comment