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.

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.

Well. With the exception of my picking it up at a garage sale in the early 2000's I most likely would have missed it entirely. I am a huge fan of the game and my 8 year old mind was Blown Away from the live action film. This small piece of MK history is important as it pre-dates MK3, which was the massive change of the series,(as every game since them has been made from it. This film is the missing links from the charactors that we did not fully know about at the time. Plus after the movie they had cheat codes for MK3. That was nice. Good little cartoon with crummy CGI. Enjoyable for a fan.

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.

I'm still trying to understand what they were thinking when they realize it would be a good idea to publish this. Those changes of graphics modes made my head crash!!

I'm a huge fan of MK saga, since the first video game but this show is really disappointed. More than Annihilation movie!!!

Fight secuences are just awfuls even for the 90s , there were other animated actions shows and movies which had very good movements! They try to impress with 3d animation but it didn't help to much just because the models weren't very good, comparing them with others from other games they lack modeling !!

Maybe it was a kind of experiment but theyd had to keep it for themselves!!