Freddie the Frog

I have seen this film a few times, and have always enjoyed it. It is a fairy-tale; it is for children; if you can allow yourself to see it in that light, it will be entertaining. Clearly the creators of this film have a lot more imagination than your average Hollywood hack, though perhaps a little more respect for contemporary audience's expectations would have gone a long way to making this more popular. I really love the songs, though. Especially "Lay Down Your Arms" by Asia. Nothing like a bit of moral 80's cheese-rock.

'Freddie as FRO7' is really an enjoyable little film. It might be a bit chaotic, and even weird, it has its very own, very different kind of charm. What's that you're saying? That this movie is a stinking bowl of manure? Wait just a second, and answer me this:

WHICH VERSION ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

This is a vital question in this case, because if you're talking about the USA version, i must point out, that I'm talking about the original version. And both of us are totally right about each opinion.

With this unfortunate little movie, American editors have gone way too far. While at some points I understand the concept behind their motive to chop this poor cartoon into shreds, but at many times, there doesn't seem be any kind of concept to talk about.

For example, I can see why they cut the two jokes about Daffers' (a female secret agent) breasts. One of the jokes consisted of the main role gazing at her boobs while taking a comment about them, in the other one however she shows them off to Freddie (not to the audience). I was around nine, when I first saw this movie, and found the first joke funny, and the second one quite weird. But none of them offensive. Men are attracted to boobs. I don't have any problem with that, neither did back then. But okay, it's not children's material, so I can accept that it's been cut. Next thing: dancing soldiers. The problem with these evil minions lies in their appearance. They do look a bit like Nazis, and some of them wear KKK uniforms. As a nine year old kid, I knew quite a few things about WWII, but I knew how Nazis looked like, and I already knew many things to hate them for. So evil soldiers portrayed as Nazi look-alikes felt appropriate. But maybe i only knew these things because I'm European... but wait! I even understood the KKK references! Still, I may understand why the cut HALF of the song featuring these guys. At this point however, those enthusiastic US editors really got themselves into editing! Geesh, what to cut next? What to cut next? And there goes the fight scene at the end. I don't get it. It's not that they cut out the more violent parts. They've just erased half of it with no reason! Why? Were they short on celluloid? Anyway, this is a painful cut. It makes the ending totally anti-climatic, and makes the rest of the fight-scene entirely pointless.

But why stop here? Let's trash out a whole plot line! Why? Seriously, WHY? You see, there is this guy at the yard who's always turning his eyes, snickering in a very slimy manner, and so on. He is just the evil slime-ball stereotype. In the original version he turns out to be a spy for the evil ones, and gets arrested at the end. In the US version, he doesn't turn out to be a spy, and doesn't get arrested. He just does his evil looks, eye-turnings, and snickering, and thats it. WHY???? Now he's a character that's not just totally useless, but also clearly insane! What was the point?!

That's nice, the movie is in ruins now. But oh, we aren't finished yet! The original version starts off with Freddie cruising through France in his weird car, arrives at his apartment, starts feeding the fish, which gives him a flashback about a pond in France, where he spent his childhood. This neat touch gives the movie a needed framing. In the US version, the film starts with random medieval castle-parts. I really got confused at first, and thought the DVD might have the wrong film on it. Again, this edit makes absolutely no sense.

No, that's not all, really that's only the tip of the crap-berg, but I think you got the idea.

For the original version the score would be 7/10, While the American version barely lives up for a mere 3/10.

Take my advice: If you really want to see this, DO NOT BUY THE US VERSION, which appears to be the only version for DVD. You better off with buying a VHS player and a copy of the original on tape.

In Medieval France, a young prince named Frederic (Edmund Kingsley) is taught by his father the Magician King (Michal Hordern) various spells and lives a happy life with him. Unbeknownst to Frederic and the King, the King's jealous sister, Messina (Billie Whitelaw), is planning to kill the king and usurp the power of the throne having already arranged for the death of Frederic's mother some year's back using her black magic. Messina disguises herself as a serpent and scares the King's horse and the King dies as a result of her actions. Messina is left as the kingdom's ruler with Frederic as his ward til he comes of age, but Messina uses her magic to transform Frederic into a frog and reveals her true intentions. Frederic is saved by a chance encounter with the Loch Ness monster, Nessie (Phyllis Logan), and Messina is forced to retreat. Sometime later Frederic has grown (now voiced by Ben Kingsley) and is now the French Secret Serivde's top secret agent Freddie aka F. R. O.7. Britain is beset by a series of disappearances of its most famous monuments and with the British Secret Service lacking in manpower, its head Brigadier G (Nigel Hawthorne) requests the French government loan Freddie to them. Freddie is teamed with two other agents, martial artis Daffers (Jenny Agutter) who also has a crush on Freddie, and weapons inventor Scotty (John Sessions). As the group investigate the disappearance of the monuments they come to discover the culprits are a criminal organization known as The Snake which is lead by Freddie's aunt Messina and her husband El Supremo (Brian Blessed) who are bent on taking over Britain using the latent energy hidden within its monuments with grander sights on world domination.

Freddie as F. R. O.7 (aka Freddie the Frog) was one of many animated films released throughout the 90s that tried to capitalize on the revised interest in theatrical animation that began in the 80s with Don Bluth's films An American Tail and Land Before Time and exploded with the likes of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Little Mermaid. While many animated Disney films were massively successful such as Aladdin which became the highest grossing film of 1992, non-Disney productions tended to struggle with misfires like Ferngully: The Last Rainforest and An American Tail failing to light any fires at the box office, or foreign animations like Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, The Princess and the Goblin, or The Magic Voyage primed for international appeal only to fizzle out due to either distribution problems or production issues. South London-based Hollywood Road Films was an independent animation studio whose writer/producer/director Jon Acevski based the film off the bedtime stories he'd tell his child about the adventures his stuffed animal frog toy had and unfortunately that becomes really apparent. While as an animated production it doesn't carry the same weight and polish as contemporary Disney productions or even Amblimation movies of the time like Fivel Goes West or We're Back, it does look a cut above some animated features I've seen, but the script is a mess and there's only so much that the bevy of high profile British talent can bring to get a purse from a Sow's ear.

To describe the plot of Freddie as F. R. O.7 (or Freddie the Frog as it was called in the SGE re-edit in 1995) is akin to describing a fever dream. What starts in a typical "fairy tale kingdom" goes to a jazzy community of anthropomorphic frogs, which in turn goes to a fantastical take on Bond/eurospy tropes and finally to borderline Star Wars type settings that if you were to show individual stretches of this film out of context to someone unfamiliar with it, odds are they wouldn't believe those segments were from the same film. The movie has a very loose narrative and that makes sense considering Acevski told these kinds of adventure stories to his young child about his stuffed frog toy, but that kind of loose narrative is okay when it's being told to a half-asleep child whose age is in the low single digits and not for a theatrical animated film that needs to have a greater sense of cohesion for the audience to grasp onto. With its mixture of spy tropes, fairy tale tropes, and some rather questionable innuendos, double entendres, and some jaw dropping scenes involving (no joke) dancing Klansman and foot soldiers dressed in Nazi chic, it's the kind of movie that's too busy and complicated for kids to follow, but it's also too shallow and non sensical for adults to get engaged with either. Speaking of the dancing Klansman and Nazis, the movie is also a musical and quite a bad one at that. Most of the songs are either bland or forgettable, and when they do happen they're usually dead stops that do absolutely nothing to further the story (what little there is anyway). Evilmania is the song featuring the Klansman and Nazis and outside of the "What!?" factor it's a pretty shapeless song where Billie Whiteclaw isn't even really singing and is more speaking while the song plays with no sense of rhythm or melody.

I will say there's an impressive cast on paper. The movie features an absolute dream cast of some of Britain's best with the likes of Ben Kingsley, Brian Blessed, Jonathan Pryce, Nigel Hawthorne, and a few others and you couldn't ask for a better line-up of talent. Kingsley sounds like he's having fun playing up the French "hon! Hon! Hon!" stereotypical voice which is like a more restrained Pepe le Pew in terms of subtlety, but most of the other members of the cast are just filling types and places. Nigel Hawthorne's character Brigadier G has a particularly bad running gag of constantly getting tangled up in phone cords and inadvertently insulting high ranking government officials or foreign dignitaries and they do this gag four times and it never builds upon it or does anything different with it. Most of the set pieces that aren't related to the monument thefts just feel like "visual noise" that's well animated enough I suppose, but there's no narrative drive pushing us through these set pieces and the emotional core is rather lacking with Messina having killed both of Freddie's parents but Freddie doesn't seem all that engaged with her as an antagonist.

Freddie as F. R. O.7 has remained relatively obscure since its financial and critical failure in 1992 and that's rather unfortunate because while the movie doesn't work, it's utterly fascinating in why it doesn't work. With head scratching creative choices, a story that feels like it began as a mad lib, a cast made up of some of Britain's finest actors, and elements like dancing Nazis and Klansmen odds are you've never seen anything try so hard while falling face first. In an era where many European produced animated features are thinly veiled Shrek knock-offs there's something almost nostalgic about movies like this that serve as a reminder of how much the animation landscape has changed. I can't say it's "good" but you'll remember it. To date the movie hasn't been released on DVD, Blu-ray, or digital storefronts, but the film does survive from the old VHS rips on Youtube. It's only about 79 minutes long so not a terribly costly time investment.

This is one of the strangest films I have ever seen, but I loved the idea & the Nessies.

A prince is turned into a frog by his evil aunt & grows up to be a Bond-style detective. He makes friends with Nessie (excellently played by Phyllis Logan) & her extended family. Meanwhile landmarks such as Big Ben are disappearing. Freddie is on the case...

If you feel like a change from the usual formula, then this won't disappoint. It's not that bad. Really. 7/10

Although every idea in the world does have potential to be great, that all depends on how you execute said concept. However, there are times when some products come out so disastrous in both concept and execution that you question how they even got funded in the first place. Such is the case of Freddie as F.R.O.7., a strange animated film from Jon Acevski, who based the feature off random stories he made up to his son. Although ambitiously made, the film was practically destroyed critically and financially and has since fallen into obscurity. After witnessing it, I think it deserves to remain there.

The main storyline follows a French secret agent frog who must stop his evil aunt Messina and partner El Supremo from taking over the world. Now as basic of a concept as that sounds, believe when I say that the movie is far more convoluted than you could ever imagine. Everything that leads up to this plot point is either completely unnecessary, like Freddie's confusing backstory on how he even became a frog, or poorly explained and underdeveloped like these secret mind powers Freddie has and how he even became a spy in the first place. Not to mention, so much random comedic filler between side characters and idiosyncratic stereotypes make the movie feel longer than it probably should, like you could cut them out and nothing would be amiss (which is funny since this movie was recut in America). Whatever key essential plot points that could have made the movie at least somewhat interesting sadly took a backseat to a straightforward narrative that either goes on for too long or barely explains much of anything, leaving the audience to wonder if the filmmakers even proof read the script.

Due to the weak and muddled execution, even the characters are poorly thought out. Freddie is just your typical cocky and overly confident super-spy with no charisma at all, his partners Daphne "Daffers" and Scotty are blank slates with only their special fighting moves to make them stick out, and the British secret service head Brigadier G only serves one whole gag purpose and that's it. Not even the villains are worth remembering, because outside of Messina's freaky animal-transforming powers and El Supremo's obsessive laughter, their motivation for taking over the world is never explained nor even logical for that matter. If there's anything slightly noteworthy to say about these paper-thin characters, at least the voice-cast tried with the trite they were given. In addition to the likes of Jenny Agutter, Brian Blessed, Billie Whitelaw, Nigel Hawthorne and John Sessions really honing in it, Ben Kingsley puts on a pseudo-Inspector Clouseau take for Freddie. It's just too bad that the one-dimensional script couldn't do much to help elevate these performances past all its flaws.

To the film's credit, the animation team did their best with the ridiculous concepts they were given, but even the visuals are a mixed bag. While some backgrounds and effects look gorgeously detailed, the character designs surprisingly lack much spontaneity and even their movements range from quite smooth and lively to rather stilted and choppy (makes one wonder if some scenes had to be rushed to meet the deadline). It doesn't help that sometimes the cluttered editing can make it hard to enjoy the fluidity of a sequence. Lastly, for some reason, this film has some musical numbers sprinkled throughout, and dear lord are they embarrassments. The opening love ballad sounds more like a depressing parody, Evilmainya gives every Disney villain song a bad name, and Shy Girl is a perfect example of a show stopper, because it literally stops the movie dead in its tracks. Not even Lay Down your Arms by Asia fits within the movie's context, as well done as it is. If these songs were made as attempts to create extra substance to the movie, then that plan backfired harder than you can say sacre bleu.

As historian Jerry Beck said it best, "this movie is an illustration on how NOT to make an animated film". Not only is Freddie as F.R.O.7. a failure in nearly every quality, but it turned out so mind bogglingly stupid that one has to wonder what the filmmakers were thinking throughout its production. I would say avoid this flick at all costs, but its so bizarre in its execution that it's actually worth analyzing. Seriously, if future generations can use this disaster-piece as an example on how not to make movies, then maybe the future of filmmaking can be salvaged after all.