Mortal Kombat: The Journey Begins

Those are the only three words needed to describe this abomination, "Ugly Anime Wannabe." The only thing worse is when it goes into poor quality CJI. Now the fact that it was made in 95 is no excuse for that. Toy Story same out in the same year. As for the non CJI animation, well Little Norse Prince was made in 1968, 27 years before MK:TJB and the animation in LNP is still a hundred times better. So knowing that the CJI is poor quality for it's time and the animation would have been poor quality if it was made 30 years ago, IF you can forgive that, how is the story? Well it is competing with the CJI and animation to see what can be the worst. You get a bit of info about why they are going to the island. Raiden has 3 boring flashbacks all in that terrible quality CJI and it ends with them going to compete. So no tournament. Just 3 boring flashbacks and one or two badly animated fights. As I said before, Ugly Anime Wannabe.

I didn't even know that they had made an animated movie for the "Mortal Kombat" franchise, before now in 2025 as I happened to stumble upon it by random chance. And of course I opted to give it a fair chance. Not that I was harboring any grand expectations as the older "Mortal Kombat" movies were pure cheese.

The storyline was actually fair enough. Nothing outstanding or innovative, nor did writer Kevin Droney bring much of anything new to the franchise.

With "Mortal Kombat: The Journey Begins" being an animated movie, having a good voice cast ensemble is an important thing. And luckily, I would say, the voice acting was actually fair.

But that leads us on to the eyesore that is "Mortal Kombat: The Journey Begins". The art style, both in the drawn parts and the CGI animated parts. Let's start with the worst of the two; the CGI animated stuff. The CGI animated parts were insanely crappy. It looked like something that was discarded from a PC game in the early 1990s for being too lousy. It was so bad that I was laughing a lot whenever they used the awful CGI. "Mortal Kombat: The Journey Begins" also has ordinary drawn animated art style, however, don't get your hopes or expectations up. It doesn't look good. Again, it looks like something that was discarded from a 1980s animated cartoon series for being too shoddy.

"Mortal Kombat: The Journey Begins" was abysmal, no doubt about it. And no wonder I had never heard about it, because this animosity deserves to remain buried.

Don't waste 39 minutes of your life on this. Not even if you are a diehard fan of the "Mortal Kombat" games or movies. Trust me, this is just simply not worth the effort.

My rating of director Joseph Francis's 1995 animated eyesore "Mortal Kombat: The Journey Begins" lands on a one out of ten stars.

Back in the 90's Mortal Kombat was everywhere. The video game was incredibly popular, the movie is considered one of the best video game adaptations out there and the theme song by the Utah Saints was pretty kick ass. So what do you do when you own the rights to it? Make a cartoon tie in of course that came out after the first Mortal Kombat movie, before the second Mortal Kombat movie and takes place before the first Mortal Kombat movie. How does that work?

This was the brainchild of Lawrence Kasanoff and his production company "Threshold Entertainment". He's the one responsible for all TV and movie versions of Mortal Kombat included the live action tour. He's also the one responsible for the terrible movie "Foodfight!" and when you see some of the crappy CGI in this cartoon you'll start to understand the problems.

The story itself is pretty basic. We're introduced to Sonya, Liu Kang, Johnny Cage and Raiden heading to Outworld for the Mortal Kombat tournament. Along the way we're introduced to other characters in both 2D and 3D animation and neither one is very good. This was at that point in the 90's when people tried to combine the two because it was cheaper than having to animate by hand. But it's far from seamless and there's a real disconnect between the two styles. Then there are the crappy 3D scenes that look like they were done at minimal cost using blocky characters who don't move very well and don't change facial expressions just like in "Foodfight!". Seems like Lawrence never actually learned from his mistakes.

The 2D animations are just as bad with the same repeated cycles, characters that don't move, other characters that are just repeated over and over again and a strange beveled effect that just shows even more how the two styles don't mix well.

It's thankfully very short and if you've seen the original movie... there's nothing really new here. They talk a bit about Goro and his brother but that's about it.

This is really just a cheap cash grab made by people who don't understand how to do animation and based on later works never learned how to do it properly. If you want something better, and by this I mean better in a technical sense, watch "Defenders of the Realm". It's awful but compared to this it's like it was made by Disney.

Mortal Kombat: The Journey Begins is pretty much a fatality to any good hope for a animated series of Mortal Kombat.

Mortal Kombat is one of the biggest successful game series in the 90s but this film was pretty much a let down.

It is a "Prequel" To the event of the first film but it just don't hold up.

It would had appear that the writers clearly wanted to have a cash in on the success of Mortal Kombat.

The animation is a cross between Hand drawn and CGI mixing the two together make it looks down right awful the characters are clearly hand drawn as they are like they were paste together on the screen.

The film is just downright boring from the story to the animation Jennifer Hale, Jim Cummings and Jeff Bennett are amazing voice actors but they couldn't save the film from it's boring script to the downright God Awful animation.

Do yourself a favor and never watch this film it just boring that needs The MK voice say "FINISH HIM"!

I give Mortal Kombat: The Journey Begins an 2 out of 10

First of all, I'll start by saying that I'm a huge Mortal Kombat fan so I got this thinking it would be pretty good. Well I'll tell ya, this was brutal, well its not so much the story that is bad but the animation and the art. The art is some of the worst I've seen in an animated video and the computer graphics is cheap and the fights repeat the same moves alot. This looked like it was a cheap and lazy attempt to get Mortal Kombat out everywhere and milk the name. The thing that I liked was the Making of Mortal Kombat:The Movie at the end of the video.