Movie Thoughts: Cinderella and the Secret Prince (2018)

• Released: 2018
  
• Directed by: Leo Lewis Liao, Lynne Southerland
• Running time: 1h 30min
• Rating 1.5/5

Synopsis

Cinderella sets out on a quest to save her prince, who was turned into a mouse by an evil sorceress.

My Thoughts

This one looked kinda interesting to me, but boy is the execution a flop. In principle, the idea of a Cinderella adaptation with a few twists and turns along the way could really work. I've seen plenty of fairy tale adaptations with a twist where it did work. But here...eh?

I wouldn't say this is a totally worthless movie, there are some nice character relationships and I like Crystal as a character fine. But the rest doesn't really work.

The main aspect about this movie that doesn't work is the visuals, though. They are rough, to say the least. The models themselves don't look bad, per se, but it's the animation that really fails. The animation often looks stilted, awkward, or just plain uncanny. It's like the animators had an idea of the movement they wanted the characters to make, but they didn't know how to execute said movements and the result looked very unnatural. 

Legit, at one point I paused the movie to check if it wasn't AI generated, because the animation genuinely radiates AI vibes. Turns out that no, it isn't (look at the date this was released), but still. It genuinely looked very uncanny and off throughout a lot of it. What also doesn't help is that the dialogue often has these awkward pauses, adding to the uncanny feel of it all.

So yeah, this movie has some ideas that could work and Crystal isn't a bad character, but the rest is just generic or falls flat, especially the visuals.