Donkey Xote

My ten year old daughter and I just keep looking at each other in disbelief throughout this whole movie. The plot is awful, hard to follow, thrown together, and a big pile of crap, really. Attempts at humor are thrown in, random, and unfunny. This movie is BAD, and not in a good way. The animation is fairly decent, but as this kind of technology becomes more readily available for low budget producers, more junk of this kind will continue to be put out. It all seemed forced. They forced to get a plot line, they forced to get some humor, and they forced to create an emotional story that would draw the viewer in. I have to tell ya, they fail on every count.

this movie SUCKS. yeah it does. not for children, it makes crude jokes about a woman. that is not all. the animation is poor at some times and nice at others. like they have more than one studio. now it has a bad guy which is not really bad. he was trying to get popular and tries to get rid of him, but not telling him to get out, so in reality he is nice. in the beginning of the movie they make a reference to shrek. so choppy cat. over all this movie SUCKS.

I paid US$3 for the DVD and it was too much!

Here what is bad about it:

(1) The 3-D animation is very fine in certain scenes and very coarse in others (probably the movie was done by different groups/companies).

(2)The main character looks suspiciously like a blue-eyed version of "Donkey" from Shrek (they even make a reference to Shrek at the beginning of the movie).

(3) Most of the music was not composed for the movie, they just recycled some oldies.

Bottom Line:

If I had seen this movie on Netflix at no cost other than my regular membership fee I would still have felt disappointed.

I've just seen the English dubbed Spanish DVD. With Pixar raising the bar and Disney and others raising their game to produce high quality animated movies with great stories it is hard to comprehend how this got made. The animation is fine but the story ... oh dear. Set some time after the well known story of Don Quixote this follows the same group as they try to find Dulcinea but the story is told from the point of view of their steeds - a brave donkey and a cowardly horse. Was this only made with Government/European Union taxpayer subsidies to help the Spanish film industry (a 'europudding')? I suspect so as the number of logos appearing in the credits is amazing. If you are a fan of Don Quixote you won't like this - If you aren't a fan you still won't like this!

From Spain's Barcelona comes a charming and hilarious animated film called 'Donkey Xote'. The title is a reference to Don Quixote (one of the oldest romance-adventure novels). The film has been dubbed in several languages and it is done wonderfully. The plot is a bit strange but the characters are very likable, especially the animals. I feel that a comedy loses much of its humour when dubbed (due to lost in translation) but here it really worked. 'Donkey Xote' works excellently as an English language film but I prefer to watch it in the original Catalan language. The adult humour and other situational comedy provide some laugh out loud moments. This film probably might have done good business internationally, had it been marketed that way. The animation isn't of Pixar or Dreamworks quality but there's plenty more other things to keep one thoroughly entertained. I also loved the numerous references to other movies and pop-culture and the way they were used in the story. The makers were clearly inspired by 'Shrek' (the makers mention it) but much of 'Donkey Xote' even exceeds the charm of its source of inspiration. The last few animated films that I have seen of Spain have been of average quality at best but 'Donkey Xote' is a film with heart and it shows potential that Spain may not be too far behind in the animated films market when compared to America and Japan.