Kis Vuk

...and now, something completely different: the same nightmare with English voices: "A Fox's Tale (2008)" = "Kis Vuk (2008)" -> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0830861/ This so-called CG-movie is just not what it seems. Lets take a closer look (careful!), at first glance it looks like a CG-movie, with some cartoon animals and stuff. However, it is substandard by all means. A grand insult against the Hungarian CG- and cartoon industry. Quality is not amateurish - it would put a shame on most of the amateurs who ever tried to make a coloured teapot in 3dsmax. A clear show-off that nobody gave a fox about how it would be a movie. It was just business. And they had the money before they done anything with it. A flagship of the money laundering system, where politicians and producers steal from the citizens on every level of life. This is not a cartoon-film for children. This is a triumph of corruption.

This movie is the same as the Kis Vuk, the only difference are the dubbed English voices. So by IMDb rules it shouldn't be listed as a separate movie. I guess the producers just wanted to start with a clean record, since Kis Vuk has a user rating of 1,6 after 2000+ votes, thus it's the worst flick in the animation category on IMDb.

And rightly so. This movie is just a blatant disgrace, especially if we consider that the original Vuk was so dear to so many people. It's nothing more but a shameful ripoff, a steal of state sponsorship money and it's a disgrace to the creators of the original movie. So I'm not surprised at all that it is now listed under a separate title. Fortunately you can't hide basic facts on the Internet.

Really not much more left to mock about this title, but because it's a fine tutorial how NOT to make a film (or anything else!), I think, I should gather the scraps and flush them too down the toilet.

I really tried to watch this from beginning to end. I tried hard, but I failed. From the first time I saw the trailer of this disaster, I was sure, I really gonna enjoy watching it while simultaneously beating its every aspect... But it's just too much. It's not possible to sit through this movie.

The movie begins with a bunch of ugly bunnies jumping through a horribly rendered forest. No anti-aliasing can be seen, nor motion blur, or anything. My eyes begun to hurt. They begin to whine, which is annoying, and you can see the credits nailed onto the trees, which looks like manure, and then a truck comes. Or goes. It's moving, that's for sure, but one couldn't tell where it goes, because the storyboard artist was a dead skunk. So this truck comes, and almost hits the bunnies, but i really don't know how the hell they saw it coming, and they jump down the road and run into the forest. The virtual cameramen work already made me nauseous, but this is the point where someone shoots his balls off with a salt-gun. The picture starts to move rapidly to totally random directions and I begin to feel sick. They bump into another bunny, which at least stops the seizure of the cinematographer, but then, this butt-ugly, and badly rendered crow starts to do his rap... That's quite bad already, but I cant even make a word out of it!!! It supposed to be a children's movie! In the forest our eyes must deal with the horrible high contrast shadows of the branches, which makes the characters blend into the similarly messy background... If something looks quite okay, you can be sure its a stock object. And you already witnessed a lot of free stock sounds too! And now we are at the fifth minute of this "experience"... I couldn't ever watch through 00:20:00.

Some people compare the look of this movie to mid 90's video game intros. Now that's just a misunderstanding. Pre-rendered (and even in-game) movies on those consoles has been based on real movie clichés, therefore all our perceptions of movies met, and we enjoyed them even despite the primitive technology they used to make them. People who made Kis Vuk are clearly NOT professional filmmakers. Not one of them ever worked on a film (being credited doesn't mean a thing). And even worse: they don't have a clue about how a movie works!!! Even if you watch the original Star-Wars trilogy just once, and you never watch any other movie in your whole life, you already have far more information about film-making, than to get a way with a mess like Kis Vuk!

Before someone gets the idea, that I'm being too harsh, I must tell, that nothing can prepare you for this. Even I was surprised, despite I'm one true b-movie fan! It's really that incredibly bad! Final word: if you want to find out all things that could go wrong while making a movie, witness this disaster. Really enlightening.

Update: I was being forced to sit this through recently, so now I've seen the whole movie from the first frame to the very last of the credits. And it always managed to amaze me. Once I got used to all those problems listed above, and managed to look below the surface which as I said is hideous, all i saw was a pretty awful children's movie, with a plot that makes no sense... I'm saying "pretty awful", and not the "stinkiest pile of manure"!

I begun to feel quite ashamed for being that harsh earlier... "you know it is really bad, but hey, I've seen worse..." But every time I started to think like that, something horrible happened on my screen which proved that this movie deserves the beating it got. And the worst part is this: despite the movies concept to stun me with its horrendousness whenever I start to accept it, it was incredibly boring (and it's less than 90 minutes long!)!

The credits are a treat. They knew this movie's gonna suck, and people gonna yell at the screen: "What the hell did you do during the production you lazy morons?!?!?!". So beside the scrolling list of names, we get a little "making-of" montage on the other half of the frame. "See? We worked hard! You can't say we didn't! We have video evidence!" I'm just speechless. And not because I'm convinced. And for now, let me part with the last few sentences I heard at the end of the credits: -Little Vuk is frightening! Everyone is afraid of Little Vuk!

Back in 1984, the folks who went on to create Pixar brought out their first short film, "André and Wally B. ". Its use of CGI was amazing for its day and it led to great things...at least for Pixar. In contrast, "A Fox's Tale" came out in 2008...and looked pretty similar in CGI quality to "André and Wally B."--which is appalling, as by 2008 CGI had improved exponentially and films like "Ratatouille" and "WALL-E" were the new norm. Yet, inexplicably, "A Fox's Tale" looks decades old and is just an incredibly cheap and ugly film.

This cheapness and ugliness of "A Fox's Tale" is exactly why it ended up on IMDB's old Bottom 100 list--the 100 lowest rated films on the website. However, the criteria for the list recently changed...and films required at least 10,000 votes to make the list....and "A Fox's Tale" only currently has about 8300 votes. Now a few years ago, I tried to find this film because I was trying to see as many of the old Bottom 100 as I could...and only recently has the film come to YouTube...so better late than never. Or, perhaps not.

So despite having very dated CGI, is the film worth seeing? No. The main problem is that the CGI is so ugly that watching it is a real chore. An ugly short film is bad enough...but in this case you have 85 minutes of eye-bleedingly ugly animation. Frankly, stick figures or sock puppets would have looked better! Then, when you add insipid songs, a story that is terrible and dead-looking humans that move like robots, it's a recipe for disaster...both for kids as well as adults. In fact, if I ever bought a copy of the film, it would be to use as punishment if my kids were bad...very, very, VERY bad!!

So is this the ugliest and most worthless CGI film I've ever seen? Well, that's tough call, as the standard of pure ugliness and awfulness is very low with films like "Foodfight!" also making this old Bottom 100 list. Suffice to say that it's about as bad as "Foodfight!" and is worthless in every possible way. An abysmal mess of a film that is so bad you have to see it to believe it! I score it 1 simply because IMDB doesn't allow 0.Pretty good computer animation for 1984...but it came out in 2008!

It is exactly the same movie as "Kis Vuk" (http://www.IMDb.com/title/tt0830861/) The only difference is, it's with English dubbing. Doesn't make the "story" and the "quality" of the "animation" any better.

Sad thing is, that the original piece, "Vuk" is a wonderful tale from 1981 and the creators of this new thing only used the original title for marketing purposes. Same reason why they have it up on IMDb under a new title for the English dubbing. It's a shame that they can do it!

I definitely don't recommend watching it, unless you wanna feel the pain each and every one of us had to suffer when we tried to watch it. My 5 years old niece almost cried by the end of it, she was terrified by the fox and some of the other animals too. The fox's eyes look evil! How can that happen to a movie supposedly made for children?

The old Vuk is a classic piece, I'd watch it anytime, but this one? Thanks, but no thanks!