Sekai Meisaku Douwa: Hakuchou no Ouji

Everything you need to know about this movie is that its execution was really, really bad. It felt like a Disney movie that was scrapped while they were still working on it and then pawned off to Toei for a few bucks. Some positive thoughts: There were a lot of "What the fuck?!" moments in it, and it was so bad that I laughed a lot while watching it - simply because it was too bad to be true But let's go a tiny little bit more into detail: The story was really jumpy most of the time and forgot to explain a lot of things happening. The pacing was horrible - and at a lot of points in the story, the movie just repeated a completely pointless scene over and over, just to be a few minutes longer. There is really nothing good that can be said about the art, it was pretty bad even for the standards back when it was produced. And the sound was just horrible and at most parts of the movie didn't fit at all to what was happening on screen. About the characters? Well, they were all pretty stupid, and felt pointless. In fact: the entire story did. There is no real lessen to be learnt, or anything positive for children at all, so I don't know why this was produced. For Disney movies (yes, this definitely feels like one), there was at least a lesson to be learnt, most of the time.

Not a terrible movie, but they definitely had their B-team working on it. It's an adaptation of one of the lesser known tales from Hans Christian Andersen, and as a fairy tale be aware that this is aimed at a younger (under ten) audience. As such, the story is fairly straightforward, the evil stepmother is very evil, and the morality is brutally blunt. While the religious aspect of this tale is downplayed in this anime adaptation, the religious aspect of the moral is inescapable (not that is necessarily a bad thing, of course). Where this movie falls down is in the execution - in particular, the visuals, the quality of the artwork and character designs, and the sound design. It's dark, it's murky and unsophisticated, as if they tried to squeeze this out on a low budget or tight schedule, or both.

This movie is average at best, it changes all the aspects of the original story in a bland and boring way. It’s unappealing, dual, and has bad voice acting. It’s also way to stretched out for such a short story, in theory the original story can be made longer but this version was executed poorly. Opting to take plot points out and just having people walking around aimlessly doing nothing. If you love Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans Do yourself a favour and watch the wild swans: stories to remember instead. It’s short had interesting animation wonderful music and captures the essence of the original story. You can find it on YouTube