The Nuttiest Nutcracker

I was in elementary school when i first witnessed the dumpster fire that is this film. For years it has haunted me, a vague memory that I wasn't even sure was real. Then I found it again and it all made sense. I cannot believe that this was shown to me in a school. I'm giving this a low rating due to the years of trauma and questioning my very sanity, but I must say, I had a good laugh at how garbage this is.

The nuttiest Nutcracker a perfect and watchable movie with good graded series in it I love these kinds of movie because they make me more happy and so glad we all already know that these types of animation are the starting of animation and for those to use this type of animation to make out a movie I think they deserve the best and best ratings because this animation video version is enjoyable and unpredictable thanks once again golden films.

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

Nuttiest Nutcracker tho this movie has the old animation but I can see that this is the beginning of animation and this is even the great try and the best good job.

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.