This movie's actually much, much better than it looks. There's tons of room for improvement, but for not being Disney or Pixar, it ain't too shabby. I must agree with everything pointed out above. The climax was rather cliche (big battle between the good guys and the bad guy and his flying monkeys.)
The only thing I can hypothesize regarding the one inconsistency is that the severity and location of china breakage probably determines how big a deal it is...they can be cracked or broken but reassembled, and I would guess they only permanently die when smashed into too many irreparably tiny bits for their cores to be salvaged. Or something like that.
The cast is a big part of what makes it work. All the great stars do well with what they have, which really isn't bad...funny bits, cute bits, some nice character designs and mostly decent animation. (Although the majority of the shockingly huge budget evidently went to the big-name actors rather than the animators!) I knew I was gonna like the Candy County Court with the Peeps jury (though they really should have used all the Peep colors in both chicks and bunnies, and perhaps their other seasonal shapes as well!)
I didn't know who Lea Michele was, and honestly I would have wanted a Dorothy who looked and sounded more like Judy Garland. This is supposed to be happening, they say, the day after Judy-Dorothy returned from vanquishing the Wicked Witch...and now Dorothy feels a bit generic. But, anyway. Dan Aykroyd, Jim Belushi, Kelsey Grammer, and Megan Hilty all did really nice jobs. Patrick Stewart as Tugg, the elderly tree who offers himself up as a boat, was adorable. I love Bernadette Peters and wish she'd get some more good roles--also a bit disappointed that she didn't get to sing in this. And Martin Short, also a quality voice actor and singer, made an all-right villain out of the Jester. He even had the "Dark Knight Joker" makeup toward the end, and then the Kansas police officer referred to his our-world counterpart as a "joker." Nice touch.
Marshal Mallow and Wiser were very likable, the former being cute and the latter being very humorous. It was touching how Mallow repaired the China Princess using his own sticky body material as "glue."
The songs were surprisingly good (especially the ballad-type numbers "When the World" and "Even Then"), so when I found out they were written by Bryan Adams, I was like, "Ah, that explains it."
I still think they may have deliberately tried to make Dorothy resemble Anna from Frozen. That's a tactic commonly used in cheaply-produced animation to trick parents and kids into watching something they think is a popular, well-made film....but clearly there was none of that here. This is also NOWHERE near as bad as the dreck you can find streaming on Netflix! x-p
Technically not as good as the live-action "Oz the Great and Powerful," but ultimately pretty good. It also reminded me VERY much of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland sequel, but then, Oz and Wonderland are very similar. Both of these sequels involve a young girl whisked away to a fantasyland, reuniting with her old friends and making new ones, having to be the hero who saves the land by defeating a villain in a big climactic battle scene. And again, a china doll is added to the entourage of new friends.
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benman46
10 years ago
A very long, boring post that says absolutely nothing of value. The animation was very poor, the story risible and the songs godawful, though the fact they were written by Bryan Adams explains a LOT. The one thing that eludes me is why are the opening and closing scenes set in the present day when the story in Oz takes place soon after the TWOO. Though as this nonsense is from Hollywood I shouldn't be surprised. The fact that my young daughter, who can be a nightmare when we go to the cinema, fell asleep after about 30 minutes says everything about the standard of the film.
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PopSixSquish
10 years ago
False; nothing either of us said was boring, and everything I said is very valuable to anyone seeking a fair overview of the movie. You've got your own little opinion, but don't expect everyone to share it. I expected the animation to be worse than it was, and have seen worse. Not a Bryan Adams fan? Fine, but I don't care; I like him because he's great. And it doesn't take place in the present day. It's supposed to be right after Dorothy returns from Oz the first time; the Scarecrow, Tin Man, & Lion say right at the start that to her it's only going to be a day, but time passes differently in Oz, so for them it's been years since she left. She wakes up in a twister-damaged house. The way all the actors kept talking about their love of the 1939 film implied that the movie is supposed to follow it up, but again, most of the characters look and sound too different for that to really work. Even though I like most of the voicework, it might have been better for them to have tried to sound closer to the classic voices we know and associate with these characters.
Anyway, the movie isn't wonderful; as I said, it leaves a good deal to be desired and plenty of room for improvement...but I didn't find it completely flat-out bad.
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benman46
10 years ago
You do like to rabbit on don't you. As I said my daughter slept through most of the movie. It was a film supposedly for children, there was nothing for adults, so if a child sleeps through most of the film it would seem the makers failed miserably. That is a fair overview in just a few sentences. You should try it sometime.
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PopSixSquish
10 years ago
I'm thorough, and that's a good thing. Fine; kids sleep through movies all the time, even ones intended for young audiences. Not every kid is going to like every kid's movie, at least not immediately--same with adults and "grown-up" films. I MUCH prefer detail to a couple sentences that tell me nothing other than "It put me/my kid to sleep." It's like, "Well, I'm not you. Give me some specifics to go on so I can tell whether this is worth renting or not!" (In my case, there were a number of reasons I already knew I had to give this a shot, but still.) One person's displeasure isn't much of a fair overview for a film if you neglect to explain why it seemed so boring/bad to you personally.
Some kid's stuff is almost torture for most adults to sit through; I didn't find that to be the case here, and know many adults who'd probably find it quite bearable or maybe even enjoy it--even though the movie looks like one of the absolutely horrible low-budget productions.
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benman46
10 years ago
My children don't sleep through movies they are enjoying, particularly my daughter who can be a handful when we got to see a film, and It's probably the same for most families. I think a film that causes them to drop off speaks volumes. Other children were equally distracted, one playing a game on a mobile phone. The large majority of kids films will have something for adults, the makers realising that parents deserve to be entertained as well re. the Pixar films. We recently went to see the Postman Pat film which the kids loved and my wife and I did too. This film film had nothing for adults, was badly animated, written and acted, and the music, God that music.
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PopSixSquish
10 years ago
The quality of all those aspects (well, save for the acting; I thought almost all the celebrities did the best they could with what they had) is much, much lower than what you get from Disney, Pixar, and the like...yet, even as an adult, I felt pleasantly surprised that it wasn't nearly as bad I'd feared it might be. I believe you that there were bored kids who couldn't get interested in it, though I'd still expect most to be entertained. I also still don't know what was so agonizing about the music, 'cause again, a few songs stood out to me as being surprisingly good for such a relatively 'bad' film. But hey, at least you'll never have to suffer through it again. ;p
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nikozguri
9 years ago
sorry, but this movie sucked! mind you not as bad as Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale, but it's up there. the animation was really amateurish, with robotic character animation and lazy character designs. i heard this movie was supposed to come out as a direct-to-DVD movie, and with the extremely-mediocre animation, god does it show!! i keep asking myself how the hell to this ever make it to theaters!
the script was really bad too. first of all, this movie's filled with continuity problems like everywhere. when the first movie was set sometimes in the early 1900's, this movie's trying to tell us that it's set in like the early 1980's or something (when it's supposed to be exactly where the original classic left off). but it's not just that. this movie had the balls to turn some of the most iconic characters in movie history, into a bunch of generic, cliched, badly-written and sometimes obnoxious characters with little-to-no development or personality of their own. and there's no point in the movie where they take their time to develop ANY of them, that never happens! Dorothy's nothing but your typical generic heroine here, the Lion's just a tough guy, the Tin Man's nothing but a emotional basket case and the Scarecrow's supposed to be a genius.... kinda. and please, don't make start with the new characters. Wiser's just a fat owl who won't shut the hell up, Marshall Mallow (god, that name STILL hurts to say!) is just your typical man with authority who falls in love with the princess and the China Princess herself is just a complete obnoxious bitch. the Jester doesn't have much of a purpose in the movie either, aside from his small backstory. he's just the Wicked Witch of the West all over again, just wanting to take over Oz. ya see, what they did here is take out the classic characters and replace with generic, cliched, boring and obnoxious rejects/clones.
and really? the songs were good? i can barely remember ONE SONG from this movie! just because some of them were written by Bryan Adams doesn't automatically make them good. those songs have to be some of the worst songs he's ever written, and hell Bryan Adams knows how to make good songs. so why didn't he do that here? actually the real question is: why was he even agree to work on this movie in the first place?
all-in-all: this is NOTHING like the original classic. amateurish animation, terrible writing, a cast of generic and obnoxious characters, a dull plot that has nothing new to offer and songs that are NOT EVEN CLOSE to the timeless songs in 1939 classic. want a good - or at least tolerable - Oz sequel? there's Return to Oz for you. cause this movie doesn't have the right to be a Wizard of Oz sequel
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PopSixSquish
9 years ago
not as bad as Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale
Can't argue with that.
Well, hoping for a low-budget, limited-release animation to live up to the beloved 1939 film will inevitably lead to major disappointment. I didn't dare expect anything approaching that, and I was actually pleasantly surprised to like enough about this to find it worthy of bearing the name of Oz. I'd been expecting something MORE pathetic and embarrassing, despite the very strong talent attached to it (and the presence of Peeps.) Visually, it looked cheap--and you could certainly tell that it was no Disney or even Dreamworks movie.
I didn't understand why the setting looked/felt decades later than it was supposed to be; clearly that was a mistake. The Tin Man, Scarecrow, & Lion could've been better utilized.
But I found Wiser lovable and the music pretty decent. "Marshal Mallow" might be a fairly corny pun, but if he were in the original story, we'd have accepted that long ago and think of it as a funny, clever play on words. Yeah, on the whole the movie's a little cliche and not entirely necessary...yet I thought it was cute and enjoyable for what it is. Would I rather rewatch the classic? Of course. Oz the Great & Powerful was a good film, though I wouldn't buy it or anything, either. The original's the only one really worth owning, as far as I'm concerned, but I'm glad I watched this little cartoon sequel. Everyone's free to like or dislike it, and that's just fine; doesn't make a difference or change the classic in any way.
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