El Cid: A Lenda

The story of El Cid has excited people for centuries; unfortunately, the movie will not. This piece of animation from Spain is overly long, lacks a gripping storyline, is not funny, and the animation is spotty at best. The characters are not very well drawn (forearms which are supposed to be muscular are replaced by drawings of what seem to be big balloons), the background does not evoke the beauty of Spain, and it all seems to be monochromatic. One particularly distasteful detail is that all the 'good' Muslims have Spanish accents while the 'bad' Muslim has an Arab accent. My son was bored and my daughter commented: 'We came to see the wrong movie'. That says it all.

I found this movie to be quite enjoyable. I loved the stylized characters, the sense of weight of their bodies design. The dialogs in Spanish are smart and funny, although there are several parts were too many facts are compressed into long sentences. I have mixed feeling on the presentation of Rodrigo (the Cid) as a youngster: on one hand I liked the reveal that he turned indeed into the Cid, but on the other hand there isn't enough screen time for us to know he will be the protagonist. One mayor disappointment was the lack of battle scenes. The one battle (Valencia) is shot beautifully using a mix of classical and 3d animation. But the rest of the battles are narrated on a paper-cut style. This being the story of a warrior, it surprised me that he was shown, for the most part, as nothing more than a skillful sneaker. Also, the final confrontation with the antagonist does not make justice to neither of the characters. Having said that, I must insist that the whole royal drama during the first 30 minutes of the movie are highly recommendable, particularly thanks to well crafted parallel stories at the end of the first act. The movie somehow decays during the rest of the film and too many problems are solved by the Cid's pets.

This is not a very good movie. Story can be interesting but it wasn't. It looks only boring, don't funny and predictable both for adults and kids.

Characters didn't very well drawn, sometimes animation looked simply miserably. You can't find here good characters development (like in charming Disney's masterpiece), dialogs sometimes become annoying and stupid. Maybe it was good enough for Spanish viewers and critics (it have won award for best Spanish animated film of the year) but for anyone else I can't recommend this film. Only one good thing, what I have found in this disappointment, was a final song. It was pretty good.

My grade: 4,4 out of 10. You can find a better way to pass 1,5 hours of your life. I was really disappointed.

Sorry for my bad English.

I don't understand really why this is not as good as it could have been. The production looks very nice, the backgrounds are wonderful and use sometimes inconvenient colors, the animation is nice, the style of drawing is nice (with exception of the villain, who is really very badly drawn), the gigantic arms add an own touch to it. But what the movie lacks is a decent screenplay and most of all, originality. The whole picture feels like made of pieces you have seen thousands of times before, it has nothing new to bring (except the beautiful backgrounds I mentioned before). The beginning, with the two young fools racing against each other feels like a real ripoff of Prince of Egypt. The villain is some kind of poor Jafar-ripoff. And as said before, it all isn't that involving and funny. Another thing that really disturbed me is the editing. Normally I don't notice often bad editing, but here it really annoyed me at times.

So, this is a movie that looks excellent, like it could have been made by Disney or Dreamworks, but it misses almost everything what makes this two companies great. Too bad.

Decent animation film from Spanish Big Studio Filmax, but painfully unfunny. Technically miles above other Spanish animation films from recent years, including this Christmas "Los REYES MAGOS", but lacking a good script. Some of the original voices (supplied by Spanish stars like Natalia Verbeke or Sancho Gracia) are fine, but others simply got to my nerves.