As a huge fan of animation and as someone intrigued with the idea of mixing different fairy tale characters, Fairytale: Story of Seven Dwarfs, despite a few good qualities, was a let down.
While the animation isn't amazing, it's not awful either, and is the asset of Fairytale: Story of Seven Dwarfs that comes off the least badly. A lot of the character designs with the exceptions of Burny and the ice monster (both of which are pretty cool-looking) are ugly and lack expression, but the colours are beautiful and vibrant and the backgrounds have a lot of colour and detail. The fairy tale references early on in the film are fun to spot, some of the music score has the right amount of energy and melodious whimsy and while the voice acting on the whole is not that great Nina Hagen is deliciously evil as Dellamorta.
The character designs, as aforementioned, are ugly with a couple of exceptions. The songs are very weak, they try to be emotive and sweet but sound irritating, mawkish and dumbed down and escape your head after a few hours. Fairytale: Story of Seven Dwarfs contains a muddled script, with lots of half-baked moral lessons, juvenile dialogue and misplaced innuendo that interferes with the generally safe (perhaps too safe) tone the film adopts. The story had a very good concept, but spoils it with a complete lack of wit or originality, it's mostly pretty charmless too, most of the second half seemed rushed, some parts felt randomly shoe-horned in and any emotional parts seemed downplayed or forced.
Fairytale: Story of Seven Dwarfs has characters that are not only visually unappealing but annoy rather than charm, and that's including the dwarfs. There are even some racially stereotypical mermen. And of the voice acting, Hagen is the only one who doesn't irritate or sound bored. Overall, has moments but is one big fairy tale muddle as an overall whole. 3/10 Bethany Cox
