Movie Thoughts: The Seventh Brother (1991)

• Released: 21 June 1991
• Directed by: Jenõ Koltai, Tibor Hernádi
• Running time: 1 h 14 min
• Rating 1.5/5

Synopsis

A puppy gets lost in the forest and is adopted by a family of friendly rabbits.

My Thoughts

For a children's movie, that sounds like a perfectly fine synopsis. Cute, a good setup for small interpersonal conflicts (because, let's face it, epic or dramatic isn't the tone they were going for here) and it can teach some lessons. However, the execution just downright sucks.

First of all, the animation. While it's decent in some places, usually it just comes across as choppy. They recycle quite a bit, and the lip sync is the worst. The mouth flaps don't match up with what's being said about 40% of the time, and there's even time where they just speak without having their mouths open. I get that it's a dub, but those can be done well. The animation is just so choppy in places it's very jarring.

The characters aren't much better. Literally all of them have one personality trait. That's it. No character development. The movie even tries to make it so Tiny has to learn to be brave as told to us by the narrator (the Owl), but honestly Tiny already was brave to begin with since he didn't have to overcome any fears to save J.C. from the hawk: he just instantly instinctively did it without thinking. So he didn't really learn anything. The rabbit siblings all have literally one trait and even that's giving them a lot.

The songs...god these are awful. I honestly didn't even know this was going to be a musical going in, and I cringed hard during these. Some of the characters' VAs downright cannot sing, and they don't even always serve a purpose for the story. And they're just awful and hard to listen to a lot of the time. 

Also: there is no plot. It's just Tiny being taken in by the rabbits for 90 minutes before he returns home. There is no quest or journey to get him home like you'd expect with this premise, he literally just spends his entire time dicking around in the forest with the rabbits until he gets sick and the rabbits decide that maybe it's a good idea to finally go looking for his family after all. Which takes up a grand total of only a few minutes. So the movie is 95% devoid of any plot. I hope you like random animal forest shenanigans because that's all you're getting.

So this wasn't a good movie. Even if you like the cute premise it's just botched so much in the execution that it's not enjoyable to watch whatsoever.