jamjohnx3

In the second half of the 80's, Filmation announced, uh... ambitious plans to expand into theatrical animation with a "New Classics Collection," a series of movies based on existing fairy tales and stories, several of which-coincidentally-were already popularized by Disney adaptations. These movies weren't just adaptations, they were full on sequels inviting the audience to come see their favorites again. Many of these films never happened due to Disney lawsuits and Filmation being sold to L'Oreal (yes, that L'Oreal) and stripped for parts. Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night was one of the only two movies to see the light of day.

Serving as a sort of pseudo-sequel, this movie begins a year after the blue fairy turns Pinocchio into a real boy, with him presumably having learned his lesson along the way. She gives him a conscience in the form of Gee Willikers the glowbug (whose advice he mostly ignores). When Geppetto needs to deliver a jewel box to the mayor, Pinocchio volunteers to do it himself. He is immediately swindled by the raccoon and monkey con artist duo Scalawag and Igor, trading the box for a fake ruby. Mortified by his own gullibility, Pinocchio runs away that night and ends up in a creepy carnival where he meets a puppet girl named Twinkle. The ringmaster Puppetino turns Pinocchio back into a lifeless puppet, but the fairy is able to save him. Her powers are fading because of the influence of Puppetino's master, the Emperor of the Night, but she is able to restores Pinocchio. Twinkle isn't so lucky, with Pinocchio vowing to find a way to free her too. Pinocchio decides to get the jewel box back to prove his responsibility, a journey that eventually takes him into the twisted realm of the Emperor himself.

I've seen this hailed as one of the worst things to come out of Filmation, and, honestly... I don't quite agree. Sure, it's shameless in its "inspiration" from the Disney version of Pinocchio's story, filing off the serial numbers enough to be legally distinct, but it's the movie's attempts to swing wildly away from the familiar that makes it most interesting. Some of the set pieces are remixed and reorganized, with the Emperor's ship being a combination of Monstro and Pleasure Island. I ended up enjoying the presence of Scalawag and Igor more than Honest John and Gideon, as their change of heart halfway through the movie allowed them to be more involved in the plot right through to the end. And there are a few trippy and downright nightmarish sequences in the movie. The scene where Pinocchio is turned back into a puppet mentally scarred a lot of kids. You don't really get that kind of darkness these days. The biggest departure is the Emperor of the Night, a Satan-esque villain voiced by James Earl Jones. It may seem random at first, but a puppet child going up against a demonic entity that steals souls by tricking kids into signing contracts feeds into the theme of freedom.

What hurts the movie are all the things that are inherited as a Filmation production. It was made on a budget and in a short amount of time, leaving several parts undercooked. Animation quality can vary wildly from scene to scene, going from fluid and expressive to infamous stilted characters and flapping jaws. The scene where Pinocchio first meets Scalawag and Igor is bustling with animated energy; when he meets them again after the circus, they're suddenly stiff, rife with zoom ins and static characters akin to He-man's worst moments. It's like two different studios animated this movie, and the disparity can even happen in the same scene. The writing also isn't quite all there. Twinkle is less of a character and more of an objective for Pinocchio. Scalawag and Igor have a nebulous connection to Puppetino and the Emperor that's never elaborated on. And there's a ten minute detour halfway into the movie with Gee Willikers going to Bugzburg, a subplot that feels pointless and disparate, until you realize that Filmation was working on a Bugzburg spinoff series that never came to fruition. That script real estate would have better served to flesh out the main characters (and I think Scalawag and Igor make for better spinoff material anyway).

Despite those drawbacks, I'm a little more forgiving of this weird little movie. In some ways, it's like a glimpse into an alternate future where Filmation got to live on.

Sing is Illumination's best franchise, and they finally did something I was begging them to do - lay off the Minions and let something else breathe for a change. They dropped a Halloween treat out of nowhere with Sing: Thriller, so you know I had to watch it. And Sing: Thriller is exactly what it says on the can: a cover of Michael Jackson's Thriller adapted to the Sing universe.

Don't get this confused with a Halloween special like Toy Story of Terror or It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. There is no developed plot or character arcs here. This is very much just a short music video at around 11 minutes total (shorter than Thriller, even). Buster Moon puts on a Halloween show at the New Moon Theater, after which he and his troupe (Ash, Johnny, Meena, Gunter, and Ms. Crawly... but no Rosita???) are invited to Clay Calloway's Halloween party. But something's afoul when there's an accident at the science lab that leaves glowing ooze all around town, an ooze that turns you into a brainless zombie with spiraling eyes if you touch it. Okay, Buster almost got realistically murdered multiple times in Sing 2, but the undead is a bridge too far? Then again, new models cost time and money, and Illumination isn't known for indulging in either. Anyways, the gang reach Clay's house only to find the ooze is already here, and Buster is helpless as all his friends break out into a choreographed dance. And it looks like he's next, because no mere mortal can resist the evil of the thriller... until he wakes up. It was all a dream - or was it!?

Visually, the short looks nice, with a spooky atmosphere and a filter that makes it look like an old horror movie while still being modern and colorful in appearance. The actual animation for the dance was adequate. I've seen so many takes of Thriller. There's better out there and this won't win any awards, but I still must imagine this is a dream come true for Garth Jennings to be officially able to do Thriller but with your characters swapped in. Unfortunately, the actual singing ran into the same issue I had with the cover of Prince's Let's Go Crazy - it sometimes slid into bad Kidz Bop territory, which is unusual for a franchise where this doesn't normally happen. The original voices return, which is great because these specials can sometimes end up with soundalikes (or soundnothingalikes), though they each only get a handful of lines. I imagine that wasn't really a tall order, because who's really going to decline being part of a Thriller cover?

Besides the singing and dancing, part of the fun is spotting the cameos. Most of the new characters from Sing 2 appear here in silent cameos (not including Porsha in the core group is a mistake in my opinion, also Jimmy Crystal is missing but that was to be expected), and there are also some missing faces popping back in from the first movie.

I think Sing: Thriller is okay for what it is, but I hope this is a new trend with Illumination. I want to see them dip their toes into their franchises outside of a movie every 4-5 years. Hopefully next time they do something with a little more plot so we can get more than a few lines from the characters.

After thirty odd years and dozens of adaptations, we've finally gotten our first "canon" Sonic cartoon in Sonic Prime from Man of Action. What that means is that these versions of Sonic and his friends are very much supposed to be the same ones from the video games, though this doesn't really amount to much and gets a bit awkward early on due to reasons I'll detail soon.

Sonic Prime begins with Eggman discovering the Paradox Prism, a mysterious gem of untold power. Sonic and his friends try to stop Eggman from taking it, but Sonic accidentally shatters it during the scuffle, which causes reality itself to shatter. This leads to the creation of the "shatterverse," a strange void where three alternate shatterspace versions of Green Hill Zone exist: New Yolk (Yoke?) City, a dystopian world conquered by the Chaos council. The Boscage Maze, a massive, out of control jungle. And No Place, a high seas world with very little land.

Sonic bounces between these worlds trying to figure out what happened and how to fix it. The prism is in pieces and one of each resides in a shatterspace, and the only way to undo everything is to find them and put the Paradox Prism back together. Sonic's main obstacle is the five alternate Eggmans (Eggmen?) that make up the Chaos Council and want to use the prism for themselves. He'll also find some trouble running into alternate versions of his friends, who don't know him at all and who he'll end up bumping heads with from time to time. Shadow is also here, having escaped the effects of the prism shattering, serving as a foil and sometimes frenemy to Sonic.

This show's main strength is its animation and action. Prime is probably the best Sonic has ever looked, the characters are impressively expressive, and there are several spectacular action sequences throughout. But this is a double edged sword because there are also too many action sequences, and several episodes feel like they're padded out by one long series of battles. That's because of the show's biggest weakness: the writing. Sonic Prime is incredibly underwritten.

This is most notable with the cast of doppelgangers. All of Sonic's friends are boiled down into generic versions defined by their alternate worlds, where they're either pirates, paranoid scavengers, or hardened rebels. The only exceptions to this are the "main" character of each world like Dread Knuckles and Thorn Rose. Nine is the highlight, but only because "jaded Tails that grew up without Sonic in a dystopia" has fueled fan fiction for decades. Similarly, all the Eggmen on the Chaos Council are similar defined by a single trope. The awkward writing also means that the canon elements of the franchise immediately go out the window once the show digs into its premise. Sonic collects rings early on, but they do nothing and are never mentioned again. Shadow loses his chaos emerald to the "void" in the shatterverse; neither of these things are ever mentioned or relevant again. And for as much fuss as there is about the Paradox Prism, there is zero lore to it. Why was it in Green Hill? What's its purpose? It's eventually treated as a super powerful macguffin like Marvel's infinity stones, but without the comic history, lore and cool powers.

Unfortunately, the writing's problems don't end there. This is an extremely repetitive show. It follows a rigid formula that can often be broken down into pairs of episodes: Sonic is thrust into a new situation and takes way too long to pick up on obvious cues, which inches the thin plot forward. The followup episode is then padded out by multiple, extended fight or action sequences that ends on a cliffhanger, which leaves you wondering, "couldn't this have happened ten minutes sooner?" Because of this, Prime feels longer than it needed to be. It has twenty three episodes broken into three "seasons," which Netflix likes to do to pad out a series without having to bump pay for cast and crew that would typically happen with renewals. Cutting down a lot of the fighting could have gotten this story told in sixteen episodes or less. That, or the writing could have been fleshed out. I would not have minded a few episodes that expanded on what exactly the Paradox Prism is, or deeper backstories to Sonic's alternate friends.

Sonic Prime has almost all the pieces in place to be a top tier Sonic cartoon. It looks good, and the voice cast is pretty good too. Deven Mack does a great job stepping into the blue blur's shoes. Some of the action sequences have great choreography and the humor got some laughs out of me (Sonic shouting "Knuckles..ses!" will stay with me for a while). And while Sega seems to have no clue what to do with Shadow, I liked his inclusion here, and wished he was involved in the story more. The writing just dragged everything down. It's popular to whine about the multiverse concept these days, but I was always on board. I was hoping Sonic would visit at least one of the numerous continuities he's spawned over the years, and considering how much New Yoke City lifts from SatAM, I have to wonder...

There is enough potential here that if I could have one wish after watching Sonic Prime, it's that this team gets another crack at a Sonic show. Hopefully with better writing.