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There were some talented names in the voice cast, so that was the main selling point. However, instead of the cute, exciting and funny animated film that it could have been, A Mouse's Tale just ended up bland and charmless.
Albeit with a few things that prevent it from being any worse. The Land of Giants scene is cute and imaginative, the one time where the film is any one of those things, the scene is too short but compared to the rest of the film it's a breath of fresh air while not quite being enough to make up for it. There are some nice colours in the animation and the voice cast try their best with what they have and mostly do a decent job, the big names like Tom Arnold, Cary Elwes and Jon Lovitz have had much better material but they hardly embarrass themselves either.
On the other hand, the animation on the whole is lacking, the backgrounds are nothing dreadful but not much memorable sticks out and some could have had more detail, textures are bland and rushed-looking and very cheap plastic toys look more professional than the character designs here. The lip-synching also is very sloppy, and while the soundtrack is not bad on its own it generally needed more drive, maybe more variety and doesn't fit within the film as much as it could have done, sometimes sounding too upbeat in more suspenseful-meaning scenes.
The script is a meandering mess and never seems to find the right tone. The humour is overplayed and juvenile (don't ever remember cracking a smile once, let alone a laugh), there never seems to be a sense of threat and when it does try to be darker it feels abrupt and tonally weird and the emotion felt forced. The story struggles to sustain the length or momentum, so it feels dull and too stretched, and it is not helped by that it doesn't bring anything fresh, almost everything in A Mouse's Tale has been done before and better. It has one good scene, which showed glimpses of the qualities that the film should have had throughout, but it was too short.
A Mouse's Tale is also a film that is devoid of a single interesting, let alone likable, character. All the characters are done to death stereotypes with little personality and next to non-existent development, Sebastian and the villain being especially one-dimensional. Sebastian and Samantha also suffer from that they feel too much like secondary characters when they ought to be the ones that we should care for the most, instead we barely remember them. Wasn't expecting an awful lot in the first place from Drake Bell and Miranda Cosgrove, and they didn't disappoint. Very wooden with lots of shrieking, Bell is particularly annoying.
In summary, while it is unwatchable and has moments A Mouse's Tale is a charmless affair. 3/10 Bethany Cox
score 3/10
TheLittleSongbird 11 August 2015
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3295352/ |
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19-4-2021 04:58:03