The Nutcracker Prince (1990)

Rating: 40%

Now I'm very sure you've never heard of this movie in your life. And you could even be really wondering why I even bothered to watch this movie in the first place. Well, it basically goes something like this: when I was around 3-5 years old, there was one year during Christmas time where my mother was switching the channels and I was sitting next to her when we suddenly came across the last 20 minutes or so of this film. I remembered a fair bit of it and how I liked it, and so I wanted to see the whole movie. The bummer thing is I never really got the chance. So while I've been going to school, making friends, getting a summer job, graduating high school, getting the job I have now and taking classes from two colleges at once since then, I've been haunted in a sense over wanting to fully see the movie. So it wasn't until last year that I found it and borrowed it from the library. From there, I have found myself fully relieved to have completed that little boy's mission after 15-18 years. And after a little more than a year from that ultimate relief, I've finally gotten myself to review this film.

Plot: Set around the 19th century, the movie starts with a young girl named Clara and her family celebrating Christmas Eve. During the Christmas celebration with many of the family's friends, the mysterious Uncle Drosselmeier gives Clara a Nutcracker that she becomes very fond of. Uncle Drosselmeier tells Clara the story of how the Nutcracker was his nephew who was transformed into a nutcracker by the Mouse Queen for revenge over breaking her spell on the princess of a far away land. Later that night, Clara sneaks into the toy cabinet to play with the nutcracker while everyone is asleep. But suddenly Uncle Drosselmeier appears and uses magic so that the Nutcracker and all the other toys come to life to fight the now dead Mouse Queen's son, the Mouse King.

This is not really a good movie, but it could've been much better. What really killed it for me was when Uncle Drosselmeier was telling Clara the story about the Nutcracker and the animation was completely different. Basically the movie all of the sudden started to focus more on making Looney Toons kind of comedy. In a way it kind makes sense in terms of trying to get it into the younger crowd, but it's already an animated film so they don't need to go that far. There's plenty of cartoon humor even after Uncle Drosselmeir tells the story. So they should've stuck with the animation from the movie in general rather than make a whole total change of animation and style for just that particular part of the movie. And there were quite a couple of lines that just really didn't make sense. So the really good parts were just the last 20 minutes. I mean it may not be spectacular, but to me they set it up well enough to really work as a climax in my opinion. Plus what's kind weird yet interesting is that some of the voice actors are Peter O'Toole, Phyllis Diller and even Kiefer Sutherland.

Characters:
Clara: Clara was an okay character. In a way they did a good job with her character, but at the same time, they left you with things about her that you wish they got more into such as her view about growing up.
Hanz/Nutcracker: He was good. Nuthun really stood out when it came to him. Really he was another one of those title characters where all the other characters in the film are shown way more than he is.
The Mouse King: He was decent villain, you have to like how they at least try to make him both evil and funny. Though apparently in the book, the Mouse King had seven heads so I wonder what it would've been like if they went with that.

Music: What mostly made the music good was that a lot of it was the score from the actual ballet of The Nutcracker. But the problem was that there was also music during the story Uncle Drosselmeier told that also didn't really work.

And that's my review for The Nutcracker Prince. It was not well made because the change of animation and style earlier in the film kinda ruined it. But the last 20 minutes was good enough even after 15-18 years of my view of film growing that I find it to be good enough to be one of those movies that I have a guilty pleasure over.