The Nuttiest Nutcracker

I occasionally saw the trailer for this on TV as a kid, but I never bothered watching it, because I could tell it wasn't very good because of its low-quality animation and far better options existed at the time, like Toy Story 2. It wasn't until years later that I actually watched this out of curiosity, and it met all of my bad expectations.

The story is a confusing and feels like a tripping mixture of the original ballet mixed with VeggieTales. We start with the typical opening with Marie (Debi Derryberry) receiving a Nutcracker as a gift. Next, a war breaks out between Reginald's (Jim Belushi) army and a wooden soldier/food alliance, then the Nutcracker comes to life, then the heroes all travel to the Christmas Kingdom. Nothing is made clear.

The food character designs looked like shoddy imitations of those from VeggieTales with ugly and plain expressions and lifeless gazes. Marie looked like a Barbie doll, and the Nutcracker Prince had a borderline creepy face. And with the exception of Reginald, all of them were dull, unlikeable, and annoying. Marie was a whiny brat, the nuts were unnecessary extras to provide filler or, in the Sugar Plum Fairy's (Phyllis Diller) case, irritating narrations.

The film's main highlight is the amazing voice cast. We've got Cheech Marin, Tress MacNeille, Jett Bennett, and my personal favorite, Jim Cummings. Jim Belushi no doubt stole the show as Reginald the Mouse King with his hammy bad guy act. Unfortunately, most of their character designs diluted their performances. Their dialogue was no better and tended to be awkward and littered with constant food and nut puns.

Given the measly $84,000 budget, the animation was poor, even for 1999. The characters have stiff and jerky movements, a tendency to clip through their own bodies, especially Reginald with his beer gut. The backgrounds and scenery tended to look bland or unpolished. The "chocolate" river running through Reginald's palace even looked like excrement!

The music is a mixed bag. On one hand, we have Pyotr Tchaikovsky's prolific orchestra from the original ballet, on the other hand, we have unnecessary original songs that sounded unimpressive, except for the catchy villain song "The Big Cheese" sung by Reginald.

It's really no surprise this only received a single tv viewing and then went straight to video. I just hope parents looking for Christmas movies to show their kids were able to find better options than this.

I am a huge fan of animation, and I was fairly interested in seeing The Nuttiest Nutcracker. And I have to say it certainly lives up to the tag-line, it is indeed a nutty twist on the classic tale.

That said, I am not entirely sure whether that is a good thing or not. The Nuttiest Nutcracker is not a terrible film, I have seen far worse, but I don't think it is a particularly good one either.

Starting with the good aspects, I do think the voice cast are great, especially James Belushi who seems to be having a ball as Reginald. The writing is very funny, with again the best coming from Reginald. On the most part the music is serviceable, with some snippets of the timeless Tchaikovsky ballet, some decent additional music and tolerable enough songs with the best being Reginald's, though the funky vocals in the gospel-like song were cool.

Conversely, I would be lying if I said the animation was great. It isn't, in fact to me it was quite bad, with some robotic character animation in the confrontation between the mice and the soldiers/nuts/veggies at the start, flat colouring and some backgrounds that aren't bad as such but nothing special either. Another big problem is the story, which has a wonderful idea but constantly jumps around and is not very succinct at all. I also felt that Marie was a rather dull character, not much is done to make her interesting or to make us connect with her.

All in all, not bad, not good. After watching, I immediately sat down to watch The Nutcracker Prince, which is another (more faithful) take on the story and is infinitely better in telling its story. 5/10 Bethany Cox

I love the song "Just believe" song by Peaba Bryson. It is so spiritual and otherworldly. This film has a lot of very spiritual undertones which the original nutcracker story did not have.

Thank you Golden Films.

I really like this movie.

a movie made primarily for kids who have not seen or heard the original story, or have just enough familiarity with it that they will sit through the entire video to the end. It tries way too hard to appeal to the " 7-10 year old, bathroom talk is funny" set. Marie's character is hard to sympathize with since you don't know how old she is supposed to be...is she a child who is sad because her toy is broken or is she a teenager who resents her parents for not being home for Christmas ? Too much jumping between original premise and the modern spin to be believable. Visually the computer graphics could have been better but would have been forgivable with a better attempt at a story. Individual performances by Jim Belushi and others were done well. Again this will appeal to some kids, but not a movie the whole family will sit down and watch together once the kids are past 10 years old.

I unfortunately saw this travesty of a film a few years ago on cable! The movie itself isn't just bad it is the worst adaptation of The Nutcracker story! I get this was made for kids, but it's pretty bad

The animation looks like something straight out of the kid's show Veggietales and it's pretty bad, it doesn't help that many of the characters on here are unlikable, also what do talking nuts have to do with the Nutcracker story?

So in conclusion skip the Nuttiest Nutcracker, it's not worth anyone's time, the storyline is all over the place, the characters are forgettable, the animation is terrible big disappointment