"What world created this? Aside from just making NO sense... AT ALL, the animation's choppy, the characters are forgettable, the songs are crap, it's just a stupid, stupid, STUPID movie, with virtually nothing redeemable about it whatsoever."
Sometimes, no matter how many animators, computers, or cash injections they'll throw at a project, an animated film can still become such a gigantic mess of colors and lines that a group of monkeys locked in a room can draw a better film. Here are some of the worst animated atrocities categorized so far.
To see horribly made cartoon shows from Television, check out the Western Animation, Anime & Manga, and Asian Animation pages.
Important Notes:
- Merely being offensive in its subject matter, a Box Office Bomb, or a film you don't plain like is not sufficient. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviancy, no matter how small a niche it is. It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this. (If you're unsure whether it belongs here or not, visit the discussion page
and give us your input. Otherwise, if it's something you just plain don't like, please don't shoehorn it in; this isn't a page for complaining about things that fail to you.) - It isn't a Horrible animated film just because The Mysterious Mr. Enter, PhantomStrider, Saberspark, Schaffrillas Productions, and/or any other Caustic Critic reviewed it, or because it was featured on I Hate Everything's The Search for the Worst. There needs to be independent evidence, such as reputable critics (emphasis on plural) for example, to list it (though once it is listed, they can provide the detailed review).
- To ensure that the work is judged with a clear mind and the hatred isn't just a knee-jerk reaction, as well as to allow opinions to properly form, examples should not be added until at least one month after release. This includes "sneaking" the entries onto the pages ahead of time by adding them and then just commenting them out.
Examples:
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Animation Studios
- The Asylum is infamous for making terrible live-action mockbusters, and you can read all about them in the Live-Action Films subpage. Their ventures in animation have not been any better.
- Izzie's Way Home is a flagrant Finding Nemo ripoff that was released suspiciously close to Finding Dory's theatrical release. The plot is similar to Nemo's if it were done much worse. Characters frequently make stupid decisions just because the plot demands it, like when Izzie goes towards a hook without any bait for no apparent reason and gets stuck on it. The film also ends with a blatant Deus ex Machina, as Izzie's mother shows up out of nowhere to kill a snake threatening everyone. The characters are all either cardboard cutouts, incredibly annoying, absolutely awful, or some combination of the three, and some of them (including the closest thing the movie has to a Big Bad) get no comeuppance for their actions. The animation is very lazy (so bad, in fact, that at one point, a man floats in a static position from one place to the other, and the fish characters often look like they're simply hovering in mid-air rather than in water), with camera perspectives so bad that they make it difficult to tell what's going on. The attempts at humor amount to nothing more than bog-standard Toilet Humour. The voice acting (which wastes the talents of Joey Fatone and Tori Spelling) is phoned in at best and horribly grating at worst. The film has a 1.6 on IMDb. Saberspark also tore into this one here.
- Trolland, a 2016 rip-off of Trolls that has a beyond-amateurish take on perspective and animation. The characters themselves are animated worse than Garry's Mod characters (and mind you, most projects using that software do so for comedic effect). Some of the shots are outright bizarre - there's no clear sense of scale, as most of the models and props are simply superimposed over the settings. Speaking of models, recycling is so common that, multiple times throughout the film, the exact same model turns up twice in the same shot. And all of that is ignoring outright bizarre additions, such as a fake Game Boy early on and an actual photograph of Queen Elizabeth, which goes completely unmentioned. And all that aside, it's written as a Cliché Storm, just like any other mockbuster, and they even screwed that part of it up beyond a minute's span. It's rather clear that whatever budget the film had was spent on getting the likes of Jerry O'Connell, Ja Rule, T-Boz, Chris Daughtry, Debi Derryberry, Greg Cipes, and Dick Van Dyke to work on the film. Saberspark looked into this film in greater detail here, having once declared it the nadir of animation, though until he saw The Misty Green Sky on Amazon Prime, he still thought it the worst animated movie of the 2010s.
- Homeward is a blatant copy of Onward, but lacks any of that film's quality or emotion. The characters (an elf and his orc stepbrother) are both unlikeable, with the former being a giant snobby Jerkass, while the second is a total idiot. The plot is devoid of originality and feels like a copy of Bright. Several of the characters resemble characters from other, more famous animated films. For example, the orc brother resembles Ralph with fangs, while one of the girls resembles a recolored Mavis. The animation, while better than Trolland's, is still pretty bad, with problems such as models clipping through each other being common. Saberspark reviewed it here
- Then there's CarGo, based on Cars. Despite coming out in 2017, the animation looks worse than in Van-Pires (a product of the '90s) and the character designs are either ugly, bizarre, or just plain boring. The character's personalities are little better: One-dimensional rebellious son, one-dimensional love interest, cliché "Punk & bully who is actually a nice person deep down", cliché mob boss (yes, really)... The plot is slow and chock-full of Padding, even ignoring the characters' tendency to start musical numbers at the drop of a hat, and the whole movie seems little more than a vehicle for the creators to make as many ear-burningly bad car puns as possible. Add onto that a heaping of truly disturbing Fridge Horror (seriously, Clunker Island is nightmarish) and a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment involving "The Spirit Of The Forest", and you have something that is truly awful to watch. Saberspark can be seen tearing into it here.
- Izzie's Way Home is a flagrant Finding Nemo ripoff that was released suspiciously close to Finding Dory's theatrical release. The plot is similar to Nemo's if it were done much worse. Characters frequently make stupid decisions just because the plot demands it, like when Izzie goes towards a hook without any bait for no apparent reason and gets stuck on it. The film also ends with a blatant Deus ex Machina, as Izzie's mother shows up out of nowhere to kill a snake threatening everyone. The characters are all either cardboard cutouts, incredibly annoying, absolutely awful, or some combination of the three, and some of them (including the closest thing the movie has to a Big Bad) get no comeuppance for their actions. The animation is very lazy (so bad, in fact, that at one point, a man floats in a static position from one place to the other, and the fish characters often look like they're simply hovering in mid-air rather than in water), with camera perspectives so bad that they make it difficult to tell what's going on. The attempts at humor amount to nothing more than bog-standard Toilet Humour. The voice acting (which wastes the talents of Joey Fatone and Tori Spelling) is phoned in at best and horribly grating at worst. The film has a 1.6 on IMDb. Saberspark also tore into this one here.
- Deos Video Inc., a very obscure animation studio under the now-defunct home video distributor Simitar Entertainment, is only known to have produced two animated direct-to-video Christmas specials, neither of which are anywhere near masterpieces:
- The Christmas Light, made in 1995, could very well be considered the CGI counterpart to The Christmas Tree. The premise is that the North Pole's toy production is behind schedule, but two Christmas Elves, Isaac and Burton, present alternative and quicker ways of making toys. Burton, the Jerkass rival elf who gets rejected by Santa Claus, falls into his buggy toy-making machine and is inexplicably frozen, and swiftly after being shattered into multiple pieces, transforms into a giant snowman warlock who threatens to ruin Christmas with a massive snowstorm in retaliation. The already bizarre setup just gets worse from there, involving "the Christmas Light" guiding them to recruit Jennifer, where her only role is convincing Santa not to melt the Snowman and rescuing Burton (who now is redeemed). The premise and plot make absolutely no sense (How did Burton's toy machine turn him into ice? Why did he become a snowman after dying? What is the Christmas Light, and why did it guide them to Jennifer's house? Why didn't it just guide them to the Snowman in the first place?note ), the voice acting sounds bored and lethargic (even when Burton's ranting against Santa, this being difficult to tell it's also trying to be a song number), with narrator Dan Haggerty sounding drunk, and the characters themselves are either boring or downright unlikeable. One of the worst parts of the whole thing is the visuals and animations, which are absolutely atrocious (even for 1995) with stiff, robotic movements, vacant, expressionless faces, and flat, washed-out, and occasionally non-existent textures. Comparing this movie to that of Toy Story (which came out the same year and which the special's box cover has the gall to compare itself to), the earliest episodes of VeggieTales (which still have livelier animation even two years prior for how badly their animation has aged), and the unfinished CGI film The Works (which began production in 1979) just shows how inept everything about this special is. RebelTaxi briefly covers the special in a Top 4 Best and Worst Christmas Movie countdown and Best of the Worst attempts to have some fun with it, as did Phelous, and Saberspark does so as well.
- The Christmas Brigade somehow fails to clear the above bar by a staggering amount. The visuals are only marginally better at first glance (the main difference being colored lighting), but thanks to the awful designs and lazy animation, this is the movie's detriment. The characters have even choppier animations than before, often spontaneously pop in and out of existence, hover in air and phase through surfaces, walls and ceilings, and even themselves in lieu of walk cycles, all of which the movie excuses via gadget belts invented by Isaac in the span of a time card (which are frequently used in this special, all just saying "Later"). The voice actors who replaced the ones from the first movie somehow sound even more bored, and the horrendous dialogue is full of Accidental Innuendo, outright-bizarre wording ("[Burton] reappeared as a frozen ice image of himself"?), and puns that don't even merit a pity laugh. The storyline is bland and generic, having the evil Dr. D shrinking world landmarks to display as trinkets (he doesn't even have much of a reason for doing so, beyond it being a Christmas present to himself and wanting to spread misery), and briefly brainwashes Isaac into serving him using an invisible ring (which conviently Dr. D can't tell when he's not under its influence). What's more, it makes up less than half the 70-minute runtime—and to take up that much, they had to draw shots and sentences out as long as possible and cram in all manner of pointless asides, such as having an entire song dedicated to the life-span of a beetle and a chase scene that goes nowhere (both in a figurative and literal sense). The remaining 40 minutes are recycled from the first movie nearly in full with the new voice actors narrating over it (even repeating the same lines) through a flimsy framing device, and after that, are just are just them celebrating Christmas and singing carols. Phelous and RebelTaxi have taken a look—while Saberspark has gone on record as saying he'd much rather not.
- The Christmas Light, made in 1995, could very well be considered the CGI counterpart to The Christmas Tree. The premise is that the North Pole's toy production is behind schedule, but two Christmas Elves, Isaac and Burton, present alternative and quicker ways of making toys. Burton, the Jerkass rival elf who gets rejected by Santa Claus, falls into his buggy toy-making machine and is inexplicably frozen, and swiftly after being shattered into multiple pieces, transforms into a giant snowman warlock who threatens to ruin Christmas with a massive snowstorm in retaliation. The already bizarre setup just gets worse from there, involving "the Christmas Light" guiding them to recruit Jennifer, where her only role is convincing Santa not to melt the Snowman and rescuing Burton (who now is redeemed). The premise and plot make absolutely no sense (How did Burton's toy machine turn him into ice? Why did he become a snowman after dying? What is the Christmas Light, and why did it guide them to Jennifer's house? Why didn't it just guide them to the Snowman in the first place?note ), the voice acting sounds bored and lethargic (even when Burton's ranting against Santa, this being difficult to tell it's also trying to be a song number), with narrator Dan Haggerty sounding drunk, and the characters themselves are either boring or downright unlikeable. One of the worst parts of the whole thing is the visuals and animations, which are absolutely atrocious (even for 1995) with stiff, robotic movements, vacant, expressionless faces, and flat, washed-out, and occasionally non-existent textures. Comparing this movie to that of Toy Story (which came out the same year and which the special's box cover has the gall to compare itself to), the earliest episodes of VeggieTales (which still have livelier animation even two years prior for how badly their animation has aged), and the unfinished CGI film The Works (which began production in 1979) just shows how inept everything about this special is. RebelTaxi briefly covers the special
- Digital-World was a German "animation" studio created in the early 2000s that makes Dingo Pictures look like they live up to their super-budget claim by comparison. There were only four known films (one appearing to be a sequel to a film they did) that they created (though all of them are actually available on YouTube to watch for both the German versions and the few English versions available, if you choose to do so at your own risk), and each film Digital World created has ugly character models, stiff movement, and mouth movements that make their characters go even further into the Uncanny Valley than they probably should due to them talking either directly through their teeth or talking clearly without any teeth shown at all. Not only that, but two of their films had the unfortunate merit of having East West Entertainment dubbing their films to English, who also were the same people involved with a few of Dingo Pictures' most notorious dubbing flops around. They released their films in a two-year period from 2002-03, so it's likely their films would have forever faded into the ether of time itself had Phelous not encountered one of their films that he now considers the worst Christmas movie ever, a film that one must avoid going after...
- Red Nose (a.k.a., Rudi Rotnase when translated in its native language or Rentier Weihnachten in the official German version) may have one of the better East West dubs around (if only because there's a little bit more of a vocal variety involved, including an actual woman for once), but not only are their dubbing issues still prominent even with a different company's films around, this film manages to make 43 minutes of time feel much longer than that, with Phelous arguing that its actual content fills only five minutes worth of story properly. Their conversion to DVD made the film darker and jumpier than it should be, but even if the quality conversion was done properly, it doesn't change the fact that the story goes by so slowly that it makes Deos Video's Christmas films feel naturally paced by comparison. This film tries to tell the classic story of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but the plot points they highlight are either completely irrelevant to the story or are told in a completely amateurish manner (to the point where the fade-ins and fade-outs aren't even implemented properly). Combine that with animation that somehow does choppy movement under a ridiculously slow pace, and you got a film that's so hard to sit through, you'll be more likely to fall asleep to it by how incomprehensible and boring it is. Phelous reviewed it here on Christmas Eve in 2021, and he felt it works better as an art-house piece to test your will through animated garbage than as a proper Christmas movie.
- Red Nose (a.k.a., Rudi Rotnase when translated in its native language or Rentier Weihnachten in the official German version) may have one of the better East West dubs around (if only because there's a little bit more of a vocal variety involved, including an actual woman for once), but not only are their dubbing issues still prominent even with a different company's films around, this film manages to make 43 minutes of time feel much longer than that, with Phelous arguing that its actual content fills only five minutes worth of story properly. Their conversion to DVD made the film darker and jumpier than it should be, but even if the quality conversion was done properly, it doesn't change the fact that the story goes by so slowly that it makes Deos Video's Christmas films feel naturally paced by comparison. This film tries to tell the classic story of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but the plot points they highlight are either completely irrelevant to the story or are told in a completely amateurish manner (to the point where the fade-ins and fade-outs aren't even implemented properly). Combine that with animation that somehow does choppy movement under a ridiculously slow pace, and you got a film that's so hard to sit through, you'll be more likely to fall asleep to it by how incomprehensible and boring it is. Phelous reviewed it here on Christmas Eve in 2021,
- Dingo Pictures was originally a German storybook turned animation studio created in the late 1980s or early 1990s tied to "super-budget" producer Phoenix Games (and Midas). It features animated rip-offs of (mostly) Disney films such as 101 Dalmatians, Hercules, The Lion King (1994), and Aladdin. Their plagiarism is overshadowed by the films' animation, which is so colossally awful on every level that they make the animation for the Legend of Zelda CD-i games look good. Seriously, just look at their film trailers. And for some reason, their films were once sold as video games from the PlayStation era up until the Nintendo DS & Wii era, with a few generic mini-games being added to justify having the films be on PlayStation or PlayStation 2 video game discs instead of DVDs (although some films would get English DVD releases later on anyway). Their entire history is close to a hodgepodge of misinformation and pure mystery that seriously stumped Saberspark, a guy who likes finding out information on companies with how they originated and how long they existed if they're defunct. (However, a future documentary released by the new owners of Dingo Pictures will help clear up some of the confusing history the original company's had.) It's not a surprise how they're constantly mocked on parodies and reviews, sometimes being on worst animated films of all-time lists like with Saberspark saying the entire company's line was the second-worst animated film stuff he's ever seen behind only The Adventures of Açela.
- Animal Soccer World is one of the most notorious of their films. It's not easy to tell just by looking at it, but it's superficially based on an animated sequence from Bedknobs and Broomsticks. What makes it particularly notorious, apart from its incomprehensible plot and laughable animation, is the voice acting, performed entirely by one or two voice actors from East West Entertainment that were bored out of their skulls and speaking with a ridiculous, impenetrable (presumably) Dutch accent, who sound as if Tommy Wiseau started his own dub company, only less awesome. The short and rather unfitting jungle riff looping in the background nonstop over and over doesn't help either. Sitting through the film's 30-minute span is an excruciating experience; even the Phoenix Games/Code Monkeys opening logos to the game are more enjoyable. Caddicarus has covered it and has declared it to be "The New Worst Game Ever Made", while Saberspark intended on reviewing this alongside two other films before giving up on it altogether after seeing only a preview of the film. It can be found here.
- Interestingly enough, Phelous revealed in his own review of the movie that this film was actually made back in 1998... which makes the idea of selling Animal Soccer World on the PlayStation 2 even more confusing when considering it came out almost a decade later.
- Interestingly enough, Phelous revealed in his own review of the movie that this film was actually made back in 1998
- Here you can see Caddicarus' takedown of Dalmatians 3, an atrocious train wreck obviously intended to fool unsuspecting buyers into confusing it with 101 Dalmatians.
- The writing's about as terrible as the animation and voice acting. For example, their version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame not only shows a heartless Esmeralda leaving Quasimodo to die in a dungeon, making it seem like the fact that he intentionally starved to death in the original novel wasn't enough for them, but also has the gall to declare this a happy ending just because Quasimodo has proof that Esmerelda is still alive.
- Over here you can witness the entirety of Mouse Police, featuring commentary from Guru Larry and Octavius King. (Movie starts at 4:18.) It features all of Dingo's trademarks: sloppy voice acting from about three actors total, bad dialogue full of unintended non sequiturs, horribly ugly art, recycled character designs (the two protagonists are the same character model in gender-specific clothing), an utterly nonsensical plot, and animation that must be seen to be believed. Square Eyed Jak's praise for it was limited to its unintentional humor when he reviewed it via the PS2 "game" published by Phoenix Games and gave it a 1/10.
- One of their earliest known film adaptations was The Legend of Pocahontas. Released back in 1995 (around the same time as the Disney version), the Dingo Pictures version showcases them being a bit more ambitious back in the day with them trying to produce actual songs for certain scenes, having the film be longer than most other films Dingo made (being 52 minutes long uncut), showcasing their first character designs that they'd later repeat for most of their later films, and being the only film that lists who voiced which character instead of abruptly ending (with 14 different names involved, one of whom being related to someone else in the cast). That's not to say they were any better back then, since they still held the same problems found with their films, including the fact that everyone revels in harming each other, repeated character stills in different frames (even when they shouldn't be on there), and backgrounds that don't look like they should be taking place in the story that's being told. And that's not even mentioning its own unique problems like how the sage flora is an old bush named Old Bush that's considered pure Nightmare Fuel, how one scene didn't translate its transition effect at all for non-German speakers (for the DVD release), or even how one scene had an actual, living insect crawl up on the background when the animation was taking place. Phelous looked into the full, uncut DVD release of it here.
- As if that weren't bad enough, Wabuu, the Captain Ersatz of the raccoon Meeko from the Disney film, as well as a good amount of screentime in other titles such as Countryside Bears and becoming the de facto mascot of Dingo in general, got his own spinoff film. It has one of Dingo's worst English dubs, and like the aforementioned Animal Soccer World said dub has an annoying background music track looping nonstop, this time being Creepy Circus Music. It also doesn't help that this, Aladin, and Animal Soccer World were all dubbed in English by someone's foreign-sounding father and his son from a different company for some odd reason instead (which results in even people watching Dingo for Bile Fascination jarred by the absence of the familiar, bad-Peter Lorre-impression-like voice that Wabuu had in his other appearances). Watch Phelous dissect it.
- As if that weren't bad enough, Wabuu, the Captain Ersatz of the raccoon Meeko from the Disney film, as well as a good amount of screentime in other titles such as Countryside Bears and becoming the de facto mascot of Dingo in general, got his own spinoff film. It has one of Dingo's worst English dubs, and like the aforementioned Animal Soccer World said dub has an annoying background music track looping nonstop, this time being Creepy Circus Music. It also doesn't help that this, Aladin, and Animal Soccer World were all dubbed in English by someone's foreign-sounding father and his son from a different company for some odd reason instead (which results in even people watching Dingo for Bile Fascination jarred by the absence of the familiar, bad-Peter Lorre-impression-like voice that Wabuu had in his other appearances). Watch Phelous dissect it.
- To call the English dub of Aladin hard to watch is Not Hyperbole. On top of the common issues with the company's other works, such as very limited animation, very small amount of voice actors, and unfitting music being looped through the entire film (including over other music), the voice acting is of even worse quality than usual, being recorded with very cheap equipment and often severely out of sync with the visuals (even ignoring the lack of any lip-syncing, often one character will be shown speaking while another's voice is heard, and bits of the original German audio can sometimes be heard, also out of sync), not helped by the voice actors obviously having a poor grasp of English and mispronouncing several words. Judging by the presence of a "Play" symbol at the start of the movie, the dub was produced by putting a camera in front of a TV playing a VHS of the German version, sitting two kids in the room, and having them read scripts live in a single take as the movie plays (at one point, you can hear one of them turning a page, and they also repeat some words they misread). And there are some musical numbers, but all the lyrics are in German, even in the English dub. All of this makes the story almost incomprehensible unless you put in effort to make out what's being said. Not that it matters, since one edition of the movie just ends early, cutting out a third of the story. See Phelous suffer through it here.
- The real bottom of their barrel may be Perseus, an adaptation of the Greek hero legend that was apparently so awful that Dingo themselves disowned it, and nowadays is very rare. In fact, if it weren't for Phelous' review of the movie (even with it only having a proper Italian dub {with translated English subtitles done by a fan of his} at the time of his recording), it's likely their first ever real film they did would have remained in obscurity throughout all of time itself. As it was their first genuine, non-storybook-type film attempt back in 1992, Dingo managed to create everything with a program that Electronic Arts made at the time called Deluxe Paint, and it helps explain why most of the models they've made over the years were reused in their many later films. As for their backgrounds... let's just say that they might have had a genuine reason to resort to handmade backgrounds after this film instead, regardless of how worse some of their later films were in that end. Consider this film as the basis of everything Dingo Pictures had to work with moving forward.
- As for their storybook-type films, the last one they released (as far as most people know of) was a 1994 "film" titled Bunny the Rabbit. The video itself is only 22 minutes long and like Perseus before it, Dingo also disowned it from their catalog, leaving Phelous to find an Italian dub to review it properly. This story has them back to their storybook roots (that is drawing each and every image with colored markers) just for an incoherent tale of Easter bunnies living in an insane world revolving around an apparent Easter egg hierarchy (with the antagonist saying that the eggs he wants to steal would get him out of egg painting duties) with a bevy of unlikable and unpleasant characters (one of the main characters is almost constantly angry and screams at her young niece and nephew over petty reasons), so one can see why it's easily forgotten about and how it's best to leave this one behind going forward.
- The Bremen Town-Musicians is lazy even by Dingo Pictures standards, due to having many scenes reduced to just a live-action narrator talking about what happened so they wouldn't have to actually animate it. The English dub is done by one man (the narrator, who doesn't even try to match the actor's mouth movements or body language) and one boy (everyone else), with plenty of audio distortion to make the listening experience as unpleasant as possible, and also occasionally reverts to the German audio track (for Non-Dubbed Grunts, one instance of the narrator imitating the donkey's brayingnote , the band's musical performances, and one scene where they just forgot to replace the dialogue), which is jarring due to the constant buzzing noise cutting out for these moments.
- Animal Soccer World is one of the most notorious of their films. It's not easy to tell just by looking at it, but it's superficially based on an animated sequence from Bedknobs and Broomsticks. What makes it particularly notorious, apart from its incomprehensible plot and laughable animation, is the voice acting, performed entirely by one or two voice actors from East West Entertainment that were bored out of their skulls and speaking with a ridiculous, impenetrable (presumably) Dutch accent, who sound as if Tommy Wiseau started his own dub company, only less awesome. The short and rather unfitting jungle riff looping in the background nonstop over and over doesn't help either. Sitting through the film's 30-minute span is an excruciating experience; even the Phoenix Games/Code Monkeys opening logos to the game are more enjoyable. Caddicarus has covered it and has declared it to be "The New Worst Game Ever Made",
- Prevalant Entertainment, run by Robert D. Hanna (not to be confused with William Hanna from Hanna-Barbera). They have made two films, both of them written and directed by Hanna and both of them being terribly-written low-budget ripoffs:
- Their Kung Fu Panda rip-off The Prodigy is full of stock models, scary bad animation, Padding, terrible voice acting (the panda), and an eight-minute-long dance sequence. The animation is so bad that during the fight scenes, the arms move through the other characters. It has a 2.1 on IMDb, and watch Cartoon Corner tear it apart here. What's more, the cover even lies, as it says it's from the "animators behind Shrek and Shark Tale", which is obviously untrue.
- Even worse is Life's a Jungle: Africa's Most Wanted, a very bad, low-budget Mockbuster that takes certain elements from movies like Madagascar, The Wild, and Roadside Romeo, and goes absolutely nowhere with it. The movie's filled with several unlikable, boring characters, slow animation, way too many Stock Sound Effects, dull voice acting, and so much Padding and Filler that you won't be able to comprehend the overall central plot, if there is one. The animation's poor at best, and even then it's easy to tell that most of the animators didn't try too hard. The film has a 2.0 rating on IMDb, a 1/5 on Redbox, and the only notable critic who reviewed the movie gave it 1/5 stars, criticizing the dull humor and unnecessary Toilet Humour amongst other things. To go even further, some reviewers on Amazon and Netflix not only admitted that they hate the movie, but that their kids (who are said to be able to watch anything) got bored with it before the film was even halfway over. Analaser rips it apart here. It says something when the opening scene is of the main character sitting on the toilet.
- Their Kung Fu Panda rip-off The Prodigy
- Spark Plug Entertainment, the American equivalent of Video Brinquedo. Exactly which one is worse is up for debate.
- For example, if you watch the first few minutes of Spider's Web: A Pig's Tale, you get assaulted by a heavy-handed Aesop about dishonesty, characterization which only serves to make it more shallow (hate those guys, like these guys, watch this guy get Character Development, etc.), a nonsensical story, subpar acting, terrible CGI animation, a lot of repetition before anything happens (think of Goldilocks and the Three Bears), and some stupid songs with talentless singers and a rhyme scheme that makes your ears hurt. This probably isn't even the worst thing they've done. To save you the trouble of watching it yourself, Bobsheaux does it for you. The Cartoon Hero also reviewed this in a marathon of some of the worst animation out there. Saberspark also looked at it here, calling it worse than Joshua and the Promised Land, Trolland, and Ali Baba and the Gold Raiders (listed on Asian Animation).
- Plan Bee is an incredibly cheap cash-in on Bee Movie with animation so horrific the bees' wings just flicker rather than flap. The messages are forced and bizarrely represented (such as a superfluous picture of George Washington just to hammer in that the "queen" bee is bad). Adding to that, the plot has no semblance of creativity and grating voices with one character being a Valley Girl for no reason. Watch Bobsheaux tear into it here.
- A Car's Life: Sparky's Big Adventure's ugly animation might be the least of its problems. The main characters are particularly unlikable: Designated Hero Sparky loves to whine about his dad trying to "ruin his life" and is constantly rebelling, trying to prove that he can do things on his own while failing spectacularly. He doesn't figure out that Diesel is trying to destroy his life and potentially kill him, even though it's pretty obvious. His friend Speedy is even worse because of her loud, high-pitched voice and being borderline Too Dumb to Live. There's also Padding and an anvilicious moral about listening to your parents. Bobsheaux tore into this one as well and Schaffrillas Productions gives his two cents here. Oddly, it received two sequels that are slightly less awful - they have passable animation and made Speedy's voice far less annoying, at the cost of adding more Padding.
- For example, if you watch the first few minutes of Spider's Web: A Pig's Tale, you get assaulted by a heavy-handed Aesop about dishonesty, characterization which only serves to make it more shallow (hate those guys, like these guys, watch this guy get Character Development, etc.), a nonsensical story, subpar acting, terrible CGI animation, a lot of repetition before anything happens (think of Goldilocks and the Three Bears), and some stupid songs with talentless singers and a rhyme scheme that makes your ears hurt. This probably isn't even the worst thing they've done. To save you the trouble of watching it yourself, Bobsheaux does it
- Once known for beloved series such as Code Lyoko and Clifford the Big Red Dog, note Splash Entertainment has since worked on feature films. They aren't as good at telling compelling stories as they once were, to say the least.
- Rob Schneider hasn't been nearly successful in film as he was in Saturday Night Live, but he reaches a new low with Norm of the North, which does not pass the So Bad, It's Good test by a long shot. The plot consists of Norm traveling to New York City in order to stop a developer from building a housing complex in the Arctic. The story is as clichéd as it is unbelievable, the pop songs are shoehorned in, the jokes (almost all of which rely on Toilet Humour) are completely unfunny, the animation (while at least still better than Video Brinquedo and Spark Plug Entertainment's animation) is bad enough to warrant asking how the film made it to theaters (it was actually originally scheduled to go Direct to Video), the characters have as much depth as a piece of paper, and it hammers down an environmental message of "Save the Arctic" so hard that the hammer ends up breaking in two. All this combines to earn an embarrassing 9% score on Rotten Tomatoes, a score of 3.7/10 on IMDB, and a 22% score overall on Metacritic. It can't even hide behind the justification that "it's made for kids" because, according to some reviews, even they were bored by it. For those curious, you have the opinions of AniMat here, Black Critic Guy here, Chris Stuckmann here, Double Toasted here, Jamboreeqi here, Joey Tedesco here, and LewToons here to enlighten you. Many of these same critics would put it at the top of their lists of the worst films of the year with RebelTaxi calling the film the 8th "WORST Animated CARTOON Moment of 2016".
- Media Hunter went on to do the first full-length review on it and declared the film to be worse than Space Chimps 2: Zartog Strikes Back in terms of plot and humor, Foodfight! in terms of original story execution, Doogal in terms of abusing pop-culture references (as well as not using them correctly) and Tentacolino in terms of writing. He also despised the characters of the Lemmings so much that he decided to defend the Minions (whom the Lemmings are clearly ripping off) in order to show people who are the real annoying ones. The film also caused him to accidentally destroy the world.
- Mr. Enter went into further analysis on the film here. In it, he points out that the conflict wouldn't have happened if Norm had just stayed put and done nothing because the only reason the villain's plan got so much public support was because Norm had gone to the city to stop it from happening and only ended up helping it. His video on the film explains it even further and eventually shows that he's gone mad from the flagrant stupidity of the film to the point where he's starting to feel like a Captain Planet villain, which is saying something considering that none of the bad films he reviewed so far made him be like that.
- Other people who've given this film a review for being horrible include CellSpex here, Cinematic Excrement here (who states that the only reason he didn't include it in his list of worst films of 2016 is because he hadn't seen it at the time), Loudmouth here, and The Nostalgia Critic here.
- Media Hunter went on to do the first full-length review on it
- Strangely enough, two sequels to Norm of the North started production in 2018, despite its critical and financial failure. They were released in 2018 (2019 in the US) together under the title Norm of the North: Keys to the Kingdom with a last-minute limited theatrical release. Indeed, it's two different sequels stitched together so that the film could be feature-length. note This sequel could be considered even worse than the first. Assets from the first film are constantly reused (for example, Norm's son reuses his younger model from the first movie and his other children have the exact same model but with different eye colors, and there are only three different car models in the entire film), and the first plot about finding an impersonator of Norm that stole from a bank is solved by Norm realizing that the stolen money smells just like the mayor's cologne, never mind that
Norm has been carrying the money with him throughout the whole film and could have smelled the bag earlier, or that there are probably other people in New York that wear the same brand. After that, the film just degrades into 45 minutes of hockey and vague Russian stereotypes, connecting the sports idea with the prior story from earlier with the absolute loosest connection possible. It should say something that they couldn't even get Rob Schneider back as Norm. Watch Mr. Enter tear it apart in two parts. Media Hunter, Joey Tedesco, and Paleosteno alongside Saberspark also review the film in their own respective reviews. To make things worse, Splash plans to make even more direct-to-DVD sequels beyond this one, with the third film, Norm of the North: King-Sized Adventure, released in 2019 to a bit warmer reception.
- Rob Schneider hasn't been nearly successful in film as he was in Saturday Night Live, but he reaches a new low with Norm of the North, which does not pass the So Bad, It's Good test by a long shot. The plot consists of Norm traveling to New York City in order to stop a developer from building a housing complex in the Arctic. The story is as clichéd as it is unbelievable, the pop songs are shoehorned in, the jokes (almost all of which rely on Toilet Humour) are completely unfunny, the animation (while at least still better than Video Brinquedo and Spark Plug Entertainment's animation) is bad enough to warrant asking how the film made it to theaters (it was actually originally scheduled to go Direct to Video), the characters have as much depth as a piece of paper, and it hammers down an environmental message of "Save the Arctic" so hard that the hammer ends up breaking in two. All this combines to earn an embarrassing 9% score on Rotten Tomatoes, a score of 3.7/10 on IMDB, and a 22% score overall on Metacritic. It can't even hide behind the justification that "it's made for kids" because, according to some reviews, even they were bored by it. For those curious, you have the opinions of AniMat here
- Vanguard Animation is an American Animation studio founded by John H. Williams (of Shrek fame). While Valiant, Space Chimps, and Gnome Alone can be considered mediocre at best, they have created films that fall into this spectrum.
- In wake of the successes of the first two Shrek films and Hoodwinked!, they decided to make their own fantasy parody, Happily N'Ever After. The problem? It lacked the charm that made the aforementioned three popular. Despite featuring the talents of Patrick Warburton, Sigourney Weaver, and George Carlin (in his final film role, no less) it suffers from a cliched plot, bad writing, bland characters, unfunny and dated jokes, poor animation, and having more holes in its plot than Swiss cheese. It became a Box Office Bomb and it holds the record as the lowest-rated theatrically released animated film on Rotten Tomatoes holding a mind-blowing 4%, as well as having a 4.5 rating on IMDb. To make matters worse, this film was mostly responsible for killing the fantasy parody genre and (along with Delgo) effectively killed whatever Freddie Prinze Jr. had left of his career until Star Wars Rebels came out. The film later became the subject of the first episode of Infamous Animation.
- Surprisingly, despite bombing at the box office, there exists a direct-to-DVD sequel known as Happily N'Ever After 2: Another Bite @ the Apple, though the only things connecting the two are the presence of the two Plucky Comic Relief characters and a minor villain. It's otherwise just as bad writing-wise, and has horrendous animation that would've been considered primitive over a decade before it came out.
- While Space Chimps was a mediocre but still watchable film, the straight-to-DVD sequel Space Chimps 2: Zartog Strikes Back is downright horrendous. Horrid animation, unfunny cliché jokes, idiotic characters, and a near-nonexistent plot are what make this film atrocious. Even the great talents of Patrick Warburton, John DiMaggio, Laura Bailey, and Tom Kenny couldn't save it. To make it clear how terrible this movie is, Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 0% rating and its IMDb score is 2.7. It effectively killed Vanguard Animation, which dissolved after releasing only four poorly received duds, and over 9 films that they were planning on making instead were seemingly cancelled forever until one of them was finally released in 2015 in several countries (the American release didn't come until November 2016) and Gnome Alone in 2018. Media Hunter took a crack at reviewing this movie, and regrets doing so.
- In wake of the successes of the first two Shrek films and Hoodwinked!, they decided to make their own fantasy parody, Happily N'Ever After. The problem? It lacked the charm that made the aforementioned three popular. Despite featuring the talents of Patrick Warburton, Sigourney Weaver, and George Carlin (in his final film role, no less) it suffers from a cliched plot, bad writing, bland characters, unfunny and dated jokes, poor animation, and having more holes in its plot than Swiss cheese. It became a Box Office Bomb and it holds the record as the lowest-rated theatrically released animated film on Rotten Tomatoes holding a mind-blowing 4%, as well as having a 4.5 rating on IMDb. To make matters worse, this film was mostly responsible for killing the fantasy parody genre and (along with Delgo) effectively killed whatever Freddie Prinze Jr. had left of his career until Star Wars Rebels came out. The film later became the subject of
- In Brazil, Vídeo Brinquedo was to Pixar (and to a lesser extent, DreamWorks Animation) what Dingo Pictures was to Disney. Essentially, most of what they did were rip-offs.
- Ratatoing is a very dull Ratatouille knock-off with poor animation, lots of Padding, and an unlikable "hero". Some aspects of it might be So Bad, It's Good,note but as a whole, the film is just boring and painful to sit through. Bobsheaux tears it apart here. Film Brain reviews here, and Schaffrillas Productions checks it out here. If you want to burn your eyes more, watch the whole thing here (in Portuguese, apparently uploaded by the company itself for some reason) or here (an unofficial upload of the English dub).
- The trailers for Gladiformers 2 look like trailers for an unreleased Nintendo 64 game, when the film was made in 2008. And the sad thing is, that one is their least eye-gouging work... At least the soundtrack by Angra is pretty good, and there are some decent textures on the characters, unlike their other works. As he does with many of their movies, Bobsheaux has a review here.
- How bad can the rip-offs be? Check The Little Cars. Bobsheaux and the Cinema Snob have done several reviews of it and its seven sequels. Dumbsville harshly and overeditedly castrates all the installments throughout four separate videos, with a complation of all four parts following suit.
- Then there's their Up ripoff, What's Up? Balloon to the Rescue!. The animation and camera movements are uncannily stilted, with the camera only moving after a character finishes talking. Despite featuring Yuri Lowenthal (whose role as Amanda's Chinese boyfriend Chin-Lin is uncredited), Mike Pollock, and Lisa Ortiz, the voice acting and dialogue are abysmal, with the main villain going unnoticed despite talking about his evil plans in front of the protagonists. In addition, the film features a multitude of stereotypes and racist jokes, with the main villain Jean-Pierre being a French Jerk and Chin-Lin being a shameless Chinese stereotype. Bobsheaux talks about it here. 24 Frames of Nick also talks about it here, as well as Saberspark here.
- Their most heinous work is The Little Panda Fighter. It's a rip-off of Kung Fu Panda in the worst form. The CGI is stiff, there's little to no creativity in the story, there's so much padding it's not even funny (no, really, there's an entire scene of the main character just walking to his boss' desk), the facial expressions can be downright terrifying, the English voice actors have done better work elsewhere (and Maddie Blaustein is among them), and worst of all it has a massive Broken Aesop at the end. The Cartoon Hero kicks off a marathon of horrible animation with this travesty. I Hate Everything, AniMat, Bobsheaux, and Schaffrillas also tore this to shreds. And even though the movie is called The Little Panda Fighter, the main character doesn't actually fight until the final five minutes of the movie.
- They have even done 2D films, which are even more brain-frying. Here is their Mockbuster of Disney's Pinocchio, which features incredibly flat and un-detailed animation slapped together in Adobe Flash that makes the versions put out by Filmation and Golden Films look like Studio Ghibli in comparison. It has no respect whatsoever for the original book (that could be conceded to Roberto Benigni's film), both the plot and writing are digressive, and the pacing is tedious. And here is The Frog Princess, their version of The Princess and the Frog, for good measure.
- Even the naming of the films is horrible. When not going for some obvious ripoff of the movie they are trying to rip off, they usually just go with the diminutive form of whatever creature the movie's about (which translates to English as "The Little [creature]".)
- Ratatoing is a very dull Ratatouille knock-off with poor animation, lots of Padding, and an unlikable "hero". Some aspects of it might be So Bad, It's Good,note but as a whole, the film is just boring and painful to sit through. Bobsheaux tears it apart here
- Besides the sexual abuse scandals surrounding one of its founders, The Weinstein Company was notorious for its bad track record with animated films, having been involved with the production and distribution of many stinkers, including:
- Doogal, the 2006 American English gag dub of The Magic Roundabout's feature film. It's baffling enough that this exists—but even more baffling in that it's an outright Macekre. It's chock full of banal jokes, awful dialogue, jarring pop-culture references, and frustrating affectations of self-awareness, none of which sync up with the original animation. Only two members of the original English actors reprised their roles, the rest replaced by the likes of Chevy Chase, Whoopi Goldberg, William H. Macy, Kevin Smith (whose character was silent in the original), and Jon Stewart (who broke out laughing when this came up on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and has since stopped doing movies, outside of Adam Westing and directing) Judi Dench Narrating the Obvious, and a pre-Career Resurrection Jimmy Fallon. The film was panned in Entertainment Weekly and numerous aggregators, and set a record (since broken by Happily N'ever After 2) for the worst Opening Weekend in Animated Film history. Watch Media Hunter's scathing review here. You can also watch the infamous Daily Show clip here. Even PhantomStrider said some words about this movie. RebelTaxi trashes it here (Though he does note he'd actually watch this version over the original just for the sheer Bile Fascination). AniMat watches the movie here in preparation for his Classic Reviews series which was posted the following day where he inevitably gave it the "Seal of Garbage". Dazz compares it side-by-side to the Average Roundabout dub, while LS Mark compares and contrasts the two versions here, concluding that the American version is much worse.
- While the first Hoodwinked! is generally considered to be a Cult Classic whose shortcomings (particularly in the animation department) are considered to be more charming than anything else, the sequel, Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil, took everything that was well-liked about the first movie and wrung it out until there was nothing redeeming about it left. The animation, despite looking somewhat better than the first, has a very bland direct-to-DVD feel that manages to look even more hokey than the first movie, and not in a charming way (remember, this was a movie released in theaters). For just one out of many glaring examples, the dialogue often doesn't even remotely match the characters' mouth movements at all throughout the movie. The returning characters have had everything that made them likable in the first film removed in favor of either Flanderizing them or writing completely out of character for no reason,note and that's if they appear at all. The new characters aren't much better, as they're either uninteresting, pointless, or annoying. The "Rashomon"-Style plot that made the first movie interesting is gone in favor of a straightforward action-slash-Buddy Cop plot that lacks any of the charm and wit that made the first movie a classic, and it even dares to recycle the big twist of the first movie. Due to being generic, boring, and pointless, the movie ended up a shining example of Sequelitis, earning a paltry 11% on Rotten Tomatoes and making just over half of its $30 million dollar budget. AniMat reviews it here, wherein this movie was the first one he ever gave his "Seal of Garbage" to.
- Leo the Lionnote is a 2013 CGI Italian film that was distributed in America by the Weinstein Company and put on Netflix, and quickly gained infamy due to just how big of a colossal mess it was. The story involves a vegetarian lion named Leo as he sets out to escort a gaggle of young animals to a hidden paradise called "the heart of the jungle" while being pursued by an evil white elephant named Maximus. There are a buttload of problems with how nearly everything is executed, however: the character designs are amateur at best and completely hideous at worst.note The editing is sloppy, and some scenes are slowed down with little rhyme or reason. The story itself is a Random Events Plot of the highest order, featuring many plot elements that either amount to little or are just outright bizarre, and has many moments and characters that are derivative of, if not borderline plagiarizing, those of The Lion King (1994).note The characters are either bland, obnoxious, useless, or some combination of the three. The attempts at humor all fall flat, and many moments in the plot are just off-putting. The few songs the movie has are dull with uninspired lyrics and unnatural rhyming. The acting (the Netflix English dub of which wastes the talents of familiar names such as Debi Derryberry and Matthew Mercer) is either wooden or ear-shattering, and the dialogue doesn't seem like it's even trying to be clever. One of the most infamous scenes revolves around the heroes subduing a terrified mother zebra and convincing her into providing milk for their young, and the way it's executed is so horribly botched that it almost plays out like a rape scene. In the end, Leo marries a female elephant who gives birth to hybrid babies that are absolutely hideous. The movie was quickly torn down by those who bothered to review it, getting an abysmal 1.7 on IMDB and a 1/5 on Common Sense Media. Matthew Mercer regards his role as the film's main antagonist as a mistake. Brian Feldman of New York Magazine rips the movie to shreds here. Saberspark likewise had no kind words for it, explaining why it's considered the worst animated film on Netflix (although he took it back after viewing the even more dreadful Mustafa and the Magician).
- Doogal, the 2006 American English gag dub of The Magic Roundabout's feature film. It's baffling enough that this exists—but even more baffling in that it's an outright Macekre. It's chock full of banal jokes, awful dialogue, jarring pop-culture references, and frustrating affectations of self-awareness, none of which sync up with the original animation. Only two members of the original English actors reprised their roles, the rest replaced by the likes of Chevy Chase, Whoopi Goldberg, William H. Macy, Kevin Smith (whose character was silent in the original), and Jon Stewart (who broke out laughing when this came up on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and has since stopped doing movies, outside of Adam Westing and directing) Judi Dench Narrating the Obvious, and a pre-Career Resurrection Jimmy Fallon. The film was panned in Entertainment Weekly and numerous aggregators, and set a record (since broken by Happily N'ever After 2) for the worst Opening Weekend in Animated Film history. Watch Media Hunter's scathing review here
- Wolf Tracer Studios was founded by Colin Slater, who only has a minimal presence on the Internet yet boasts about his talents as a music and television producer. The studio is only known to have made two animated projects, both of which were previously lost and only uncovered in the mid-2010s. Both were made with homemade software that allowed faster production time... and it shows. Slater even foolishly hoped to make franchises of these films. Also, there were rumors that the studio had ties with Scientology, which could explain how they got high-profile voice actors and Nancy Cartwright, who is a Scientologist herself, as a lead producer and actor.
- Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa, a musical Christmas Special marred by problems such as flat to the point of being stereotypical characters (e.g., two of the kids are a hip black kid and a short fat kid with a sandwich in his hand), an emotionally manipulative Cliché Storm of a plot, exceedingly abysmal animation with downright-ugly character designs even for 2002 that puts Vídeo Brinquedo to shame (in fact, it actually makes them look like Industrial Light & Magic by comparison), and to top it all off the wasted talents of actors like Mark Hamill, Jodi Benson, and Paige O'Hara (this might be an indicator of where most of the budget went). Publicity for the special even had the gall to compare the characters with the Peanuts gang. How this ever made its way onto network TV is anyone's guess. Watch the whole abomination here, and be sure to check out its website for more cruddy Christmas cheer.
- Curiously, there is one trait that is universally agreed to be pretty good: The voice acting, which is actually pretty decent. However, it's universally acknowledged that this is only by virtue of having the aforementioned voice-acting legends in it, and it's far from enough to save the special.
- As it was being broadcast, viewers took to the internet to express their surprise that something of that quality made it onto TV. Kyle Norty reviewed it in December 2015, saying it had the worst CG animation he had ever seen. The next year in 2016, Bobsheaux threw in his two cents. Pan Pizza calls this the 7th Worst Cartoon (In No Particular Order) in his usual hilarious way. And to complete the 2016 trifecta, witness Mr. Enter endure this mess.
- On the first Tuesday of December 2017, a remarkable coincidence resulted in three Internet connoisseurs of terrible animation discussing Rapsittie Street Kids on the same day. The Nostalgia Critic covered this trainwreck, saying that it and The Christmas Tree are tied for "worst Christmas special ever". The Island of Misfit Christmas Specials' Peter Paltridge called it "...an unholy mess that it's mindboggling it could air on commercial TV", plausibly predicting that it could reach a mainstream level of ironic fame. Phelous deemed it, to quote Silent Hill, "...A world of someone's nightmarish delusions come to life."
- In December 2020, Saberspark reviewed it as one last screw-you to the year that was.
- Dinosaur Island is an adventure where three explorers wash up on an island populated by dinosaurs. Still sporting the stilted and hideous animation of Believe in Santa, this film also has a premise ripped off from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, bland characters with weak attempts at development, and an abundance of Exposition. Sadly, this island of dinosaurs isn't even remotely worth exploring. The entire trainwreck can be seen here, and Saberspark reviews it here. And no, not even Mark Hamill can save this film.
- Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa, a musical Christmas Special marred by problems such as flat to the point of being stereotypical characters (e.g., two of the kids are a hip black kid and a short fat kid with a sandwich in his hand), an emotionally manipulative Cliché Storm of a plot, exceedingly abysmal animation with downright-ugly character designs even for 2002 that puts Vídeo Brinquedo to shame (in fact, it actually makes them look like Industrial Light & Magic by comparison), and to top it all off the wasted talents of actors like Mark Hamill, Jodi Benson, and Paige O'Hara (this might be an indicator of where most of the budget went). Publicity for the special even had the gall to compare the characters with the Peanuts gang. How this ever made its way onto network TV is anyone's guess. Watch the whole abomination here
- WowNow Entertainment is a low-budget American-Canadian animation studio (first thought to be in Hawaii before things mentioned mixed sources relating to Delaware, Ontario, and even Michigan) that might as well be the modern Vídeo Brinquedo in terms of valuing quantity over quality. All of their animated movies (they also do live-action horror films, by the way) have terrible animation, nonsensical and boring plots, stolen assets, reused footage, and godawful voice acting, audio, and dialogue. Some of their movies are nothing but characters dancing. They also use Blatant Lies on their website, such as saying to be quickly establishing itself as a high-quality animation studio and claiming ownership of the popular-in-China Boonie Bears franchise and other Fantawild shows when in reality, they are owned by Fantawild itself. Not only that, but there's also a possibility of them inflating the ratings for their movies on IMDB. And for good measure, sometimes under different names like Dream Machine Animation, Brainy Pants, Toe Jamz, Family Entertainment.TV, DocTV, PupTV, and FreeMoviesAndTV (the last name is for YouTube). They have made multiple mockbusters of different popular films that Disney and DreamWorks made, like Kung Fu Panda and Finding Nemo. Not only that but they've also made movies meant for Christian families to pick up (or even both on rare occasions). Despite all of that, they were bought up in 2022 by International Media Network.
- Bible Town is a "movie" released in 2017 where three teenagers hop in a hot air balloon that takes them to the titular Bible Town. Along the way, they each tell stories that are directly from The Bible before they meet an old lady in the town who tells her story from the Bible to them before they leave the Bible Town to end the movie right there and then. While the film really doesn't sound like anything special on the surface, the things that devolve it into horrible schlock that makes you wish you were reading the Bible instead of watching Bible Town are the computer graphic modeling of the people that have eyes, teeth, and lips that make them part of the Uncanny Valley, awful voice acting and lip syncing (with one of the teens even having lower quality to her sound over every other character), and the fact that when they do tell the stories from the Bible... they're just showing standard 2D art pictures being panned all over the place from the beginning to the end of these stories! The fact that the dialogue spoken by the teenagers makes a standard person think they're mocking the Christian viewers for picking this film up (due to a condescending-sounding tone to some of the actors) and that they only stay in Bible Town (which inconsistently went from a farm setting to an actual town setting going from the air to the ground) for about 10 minutes made Saberspark think this is the worst Christian-based animated film he's ever seen now. So much so, in fact, that he not only believes he could make a better Christian-focused movie by a week's time, but he actually considered studios like the Asylum, Video Brinquedo, and even Dingo Pictures to all be better than WowNow Entertainment to the point where they're now his most-hated animation studio out there. PhantomStrider also saw it as one of the worst religious films he ever saw in this list here.
- Día of the Dead is what happens when you try and turn the setting of Coco into an exposition dump that results in absolutely nothing of merit happening throughout the entire movie. How do they do that, you might ask? Simple: Take a story that arguably takes 15 minutes to complete into over an hour and 20 or so minutes long via tons of exposition said and animations repeated throughout, have a climax that's more ridiculous due to how it does its concert, and concludes it with the luchador mother (Julieta) admitting that the concert that she spent two years preparing for was ultimately pointless on her end. Despite the mother being absent for said two years, though, the young child named Chiqui (who looks like a baby ripped from Cocomelon wearing a luchador mask regardless of whether he's supposed to be 6, 8, or even 10 years old) only recently misses his mother after she's been in "The Beyond" for two years, with the father being able to know how to get him and his son there like the mother apparently knew how to do two years beforehand as well. Once there, Chiqui and his father need to do two good deeds while out in "The Beyond" to help support Julieta in the "Greatest Singer Beyond the Beyond" legally (which leads to Chiqui and Julieta dancing after Julieta doing her song, while the father dances the Gangnam Style dance) to beat a 10,000 year-long championship streak held by a skeleton woman that sings very awkwardly herself. Even ignoring how all over the place and absolutely pointless the actual plot is, the actual character designs are weirdly inconsistent in terms of designs (notably the skeletons that talk with only the top of the skulls talking sometimes and the aforementioned baby child model), and they repeat things so much that it'd earn its place here through that alone. Saberspark covered this film and lost his shit through it here.
- The Fishtales franchise is a series of Finding Nemo rip-offs. The first film was just a group of poorly animated sea animals floating over live-action footage of sea animals with an excuse of finding a lost octopus and had an opening that resembled a worse version of the "Crab Rave" music video. The sequels have nothing to do with the first movie. The franchise as a whole is animated in 100% eye-scorching CGI and focuses on a female fish named Fifi and her friends, consisting solely of her and a bunch of characters staring at you as they swim and talk about random crap. The series claims to be an educational series of films about marine biology, but they can't even get the characters represented right, like the sequels having dolphins and whales having tail fins that go from side to side instead of up and down. Saberspark discusses it and other Finding Nemo rip-offs here.
- In addition to Fishtales, they also made a full-blown Christian Mockbuster of Finding Nemo titled Finding Jesus. The way the film is titled makes you think it's a coming-to-Jesus-type story, but in reality it's a series of incoherent short stories that are vaguely related back to the Bible, feature little-to-no conflict, and any conflict that actually has stakes involved is quickly resolved off-screen. The dialogue feels like it was written by an AI, and lines are repeated ad nauseam, sometimes in the same scene by the same character, by the unenthusiastic voice actors. The animation consists solely of models idling in one place with the same repeating animations, and all characters have a perpetual smile even when it doesn't match what emotion they're supposed to be expressing. If that wasn't bad enough, the film even features Japanese racial stereotyping in the form of a talking sushi roll aptly named Mr. Sushi. One dubious source claims the Vatican financed $20 million towards the film, said source also claimed that Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger were supposed to be in the film. Even still, one must wonder where all the money went as Sausage Party was produced with a similar budget to much better results. Saberspark also looked into this film here, as did Brad Jones & Rob Walker here. MoBrosStudios (under his Enigmatic Mr. Exit character) also reviewed the film here.
- What's even worse is that there's actually a sequel to it. If you thought Finding Jesus even existed was bad enough, try watching Finding Jesus 2! This film came out in May 2021 after the first film was released in November 2020, so this feels like a combination of crunch management and just plain not caring about everything they've done for it. Some of the voice actors sound less enthusiastic with their line readings than they did in the first film (and it's not like their acting was a positive either), with the scripting being a bit more mean-spirited for a Christian film than the original film was (including weird lines of the fish characters being "therapists for Jesus"), and the general tone almost feeling more like a poor man's attempt at South Park humor or satire than anything serious. Regardless of whether this is meant to be serious or not, it fails to separate itself from appealing to either possible scenario. Saberspark considers only its existence worst than the worst film he's ever watched (in terms of a technical level, at least) in The Adventures of Açela, to the point of even destroying the DVD and its casing.
- Zoo Wars is what you'd get if Seltzer and Friedberg made a DreamWorks Animation wannabe kids movie for Vídeo Brinquedo. Allegedly a Star Wars parody, the movie has the same problems that plague most of their movies, and most of the "jokes" consists of random references, characters saying names of sauces, and random insults. Most characters spend a good chunk of the movie sitting on chairs, to the point where A New Hope's Death Star trench run has more action than this entire movie. What's worse is that it even got a sequel.
- Bible Town is a "movie" released in 2017 where three teenagers hop in a hot air balloon that takes them to the titular Bible Town. Along the way, they each tell stories that are directly from The Bible before they meet an old lady in the town who tells her story from the Bible to them before they leave the Bible Town to end the movie right there and then. While the film really doesn't sound like anything special on the surface, the things that devolve it into horrible schlock that makes you wish you were reading the Bible instead of watching Bible Town are the computer graphic modeling of the people that have eyes, teeth, and lips that make them part of the Uncanny Valley, awful voice acting and lip syncing (with one of the teens even having lower quality to her sound over every other character), and the fact that when they do tell the stories from the Bible... they're just showing standard 2D art pictures being panned all over the place from the beginning to the end of these stories! The fact that the dialogue spoken by the teenagers makes a standard person think they're mocking the Christian viewers for picking this film up (due to a condescending-sounding tone to some of the actors) and that they only stay in Bible Town (which inconsistently went from a farm setting to an actual town setting going from the air to the ground) for about 10 minutes made Saberspark think this is the worst Christian-based animated film he's ever seen now. So much so, in fact, that he not only believes he could make a better Christian-focused movie by a week's time, but he actually considered studios like the Asylum, Video Brinquedo, and even Dingo Pictures to all be better than WowNow Entertainment to the point where they're now his most-hated animation studio out there.
Theatrical Shorts
- The 1967 adaptation of The Hobbit produced by William L. Snyder and animated by Gene Deitch constitutes an animated film only in the sense that it's voiced (by Herb Lass, who narrates everything) and has drawn images moving around a screen. (Said images are poorly drawn and only moving because of The Ken Burns Effect.) Add that to the short run time (12 minutes, due to some Loophole Abuse in its production) and its lack of fidelity to the source material, and you've got something that will make even the worst aspects of Peter Jackson's take on the series seem like small potatoes in comparison. In fact, it was initially planned to be a Hobbit feature film; after a botched distribution deal with 20th Century Fox, this short was hastily made as an Ashcan Copy so Snyder could retain the film rights to J. R. R. Tolkien's stories and sell them back after "release" (in a small projection room, on the last day Snyder still had the rights), explaining the total lack of effort. Deitch himself regretted how the end product turned out. You can watch the Annotation crew tear it apart here. You can watch Dominic Noble talk about it here.
- Looney Tunes is widely considered to be among the most influential cartoon series ever produced. However, they were not without their growing pains:
- After Harman and Ising quit Warner Bros. for MGM in 1933 and took their star character Bosko with them, the newly-formed Leon Schlesinger Productions rushed out two cartoons directed by former Disney animator Tom Palmer, "Buddy's Day Out" and "I've Got to Sing a Torch Song". Palmer's inexperience as a director was evident; not only did the former introduce the infamously nondescript Buddy, but both cartoons featured poor animation, sluggish pacing, cloying tones, and paper-thin stories. The worst part? Both cartoons are utterly devoid of humor, with very few (uninspired) gags. And that was after Friz Freleng was called back in to rework these cartoons once Warners rejected the (even less funny) original versions. Palmer was sacked by Schlesinger after the cartoons were originally rejected, and the series was stuck with Buddy as its lead character until 1935, when Freleng's "I Haven't Got A Hat" introduced the far more successful Porky Pig and sent Buddy into an unceremonious retirement. Likely Looney, Mostly Merrie rips into both cartoons.
- The "Daffy vs. Speedy" series of cartoonsnote and the "Larriva Eleven"note from the series' Audience-Alienating Era in The '60s are of debatable quality. However, even fans of this era generally regard Daffy and Speedy's final classic short, 1968's "See Ya Later Gladiator", as the absolute nadir of the Looney Tunes franchise. This cartoon is riddled with an uncharacteristic plot (in which Daffy and Speedy are accidentally sent back to Rome in 65 A.D. and try to evade Emperor Nero), sloppy artwork, half-assed animationnote , bland, forgettable music (including a horribly off-key version of the already-bizarre 1960s rearrangements to "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down"), overuse of Hanna-Barbera's Stock Sound Effects, lame and/or borderline-nonexistent gags, corny writing, and Daffy's nastier qualities returning in full swing even after prior shorts tried dialing them back. Probably the one good thing about it is Mel Blanc's top-notch voice acting. PhantomStrider had a few words to say about this mess. Strangely enough, despite its negative reputation, it retains a 5.0/10 rating on IMDb.
- While Cool Cat (the star of Looney Tunes during its twilight years in The Golden Age of Animation) wasn't as popular as past characters such as Bugs Bunny, he still has his fans. However, his last outing, "Injun Trouble"note , is generally agreed to be a very undignified end for the classic run of Warner Bros. cartoons. Beyond the rampant use of Native American stereotypes that were barely acceptable even in 1969, this cartoon relies on a nonexistent story full of bad puns, pointless or repetitive scenesnote , and groan-worthy "comedy", lacking much of the franchise's trademark slapstick; the animation and artwork are very lazy, Limited Sound Effects are aboundnote , Larry Storch's talent is wasted, and William Lava's music score is still unremarkable. Tragically, it was also the final Warner Bros. cartoon series veteran Robert McKimson directed before his death in 1977. Due to the Native American stereotyping and it being produced during the series' unpopular Seven Arts era, Warner Bros. has given this short minimal exposure or acknowledgment. On IMDb, it is the lowest-rated Looney Tunes short on the site at 4.0. Unshaved Mouse covers this dreck, as do Zak Wolf on his blog and this Film Threat article.
- After Harman and Ising quit Warner Bros. for MGM in 1933 and took their star character Bosko with them, the newly-formed Leon Schlesinger Productions rushed out two cartoons directed by former Disney animator Tom Palmer, "Buddy's Day Out" and "I've Got to Sing a Torch Song". Palmer's inexperience as a director was evident; not only did the former introduce the infamously nondescript Buddy, but both cartoons featured poor animation, sluggish pacing, cloying tones, and paper-thin stories. The worst part? Both cartoons are utterly devoid of humor, with very few (uninspired) gags. And that was after Friz Freleng was called back in to rework these cartoons once Warners rejected the (even less funny) original versions. Palmer was sacked by Schlesinger after the cartoons were originally rejected, and the series was stuck with Buddy as its lead character until 1935, when Freleng's "I Haven't Got A Hat" introduced the far more successful Porky Pig and sent Buddy into an unceremonious retirement. Likely Looney, Mostly Merrie rips into both
- How bad is The Magic of Oz (an animated short based on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz)? It's absolutely irredeemable, as it has virtually no plot, terrible sound quality, and laughably ugly and dated animation. Background information about the film is also scarce. A Google search for many of the names featured at the beginning will bring up little results, and the cartoon studio that produced it is never stated - all it says at the end is "A Cartoon Film Presentation". No date is even known for when this cartoon was released; the only approximate guess is about the early 1960s, according to this Tumblr post. The film contains a lot of Limited Animation, and there's also a very out-of-place three-second shot of Dorothy bending down that's done, rather incompetently, in Rotoscope, even though the rest of the cartoon has none of it at all - clearly, just drawing Dorothy performing the action would've been too difficult. Despite being under ten minutes, it moves at a snail's pace and is incomprehensible, and the very poor sound makes it difficult to hear even with the volume on a computer turned up to its maximum level. All of this makes it a contender for the worst animated short of all time. The Autarch (or rather, Hades) has this to say.
