YMMV / Hoffmaniada

• Continuity Lockout: While the film is surreal enough as it is, some general knowledge of Hoffmann's work is practically a requirement to make any sense of it at all.
• Critical Dissonance: The film got glowing critical reviews, but audiences found the Mind Screwy, Reference Overdosed, borderline Random Events Plot a bit hard to swallow. Overall, the ratings largely ended up as So Okay, It's Average.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • Ernst is portrayed as suffering from near constant, uncontrollable hallucinations which have a highly detrimental effect on his daily life.
  • There is also Little Zaches, who has largely lost his Ambiguously Human traits and mostly comes off as this.
• Dull Surprise: The voice acting has been criticized for this, with some comparing it unfavorbly to an audio book.
• Iron Woobie: Arguably, Soyuzmultfilm themselves, who kept working on the project for 17 years despite it going in and out of production due to budget cuts which would likely make other studios cancel the whole thing.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The film is pretty mild overall, but Olympia and especially Coppelius do still have a bit of a creep factor, as they should.
  • There is also the Old Witch's cermony, which seemingly became a Deleted Scene for being too scary for kids.
• One-Scene Wonder: Drosselmeyer, who shows up for only a few seconds... ridning in a big, flying shoe and using his Magic Cloak to turn Ernst into a giant. It's just as weird as it sounds.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • Could be seen as one to Paul Berry's 1991 adaptation of The Sandman (1816), which is also one of the stories this film pulls material from.
  • It also has many similarities to The Tales of Hoffmann, another BiographyLeClef in which a fictionalized E. T. A. Hoffmann is cast as the romantic hero in a Fusion Fic of his own stories.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The film's animation and art style has become its most praised aspect.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The characters from Little Zaches, Great Zinnober only appear in one scene each, which basically just amounts to The Cameo.

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