YMMV / The Guardians of the Lost Code

• Anti-Climax Boss: Poor Elmer and Garras have the dubious distinction of having this happen to them TWICE… in the same climax:
  • First, after fusing for the first time and beating the 3 heroes rather easily, they’re easily defated by them… just shooting their special attacks at the same time.
  • Then, after transforming into their final form and imprisoning the heroes in a nightmare dimension and putting a decent (if short) fight with the true chosen ones, they're easily put down by Freddy easily seeing through their illusion (in less than a minute, by the way) and all the people at the museum suddenly remembering their Brijes (apparently it was THAT easy despite what the narrator said at the beginning) and shooting energy beams at him.
• Awesome Music: If there’s one thing people can agree about the movie, is that the score by Juan Manuel Langarica is excellent.
  • The theme song, “HOT CAKES” by Leon Polar, is pretty good, too.
• Cliché Storm: Basically what sealed this movie’s fate. The story and characters are so generic and steal concepts from much better series that it led to it bombing HARD at the box-office and didn’t generate any interest from the few people who actually watched it.
• Ending Fatigue: While the pacing was already pretty abysmal, the final act takes the cake. The way it’s presented feels like if they took the last 3 or 4 episodes of a series and crammed them in order to make a climax that’s a little over 5 minutes long but feels way longer than that, thus making it feel like it’s way too cluttered to feel satisfying as it doesn’t give you any time to breathe. Some people have even compared it to the polarizing Future Trunks Saga from Dragon Ball Super (although at least that one wasn’t an hour and a half movie). Because of this, some people suspect that the movie was originally conceived as a series and they just haphazardly crammed what they had to make a movie.
• Ham and Cheese: Despite voicing generic villains, both Jose Luis Orozco and Ricardo Tejedo really went out of their way to make Elmer and Garras sound evil. You can tell they had fun voicing them.
  • Same thing goes for Edgar Vivar as Zompul Balam. He makes his short appearance worth every second.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The concept of having Alebrijes as monster companions would be revisited in Pixar’s Coco.
• Nightmare Fuel: Elmer as a living corpse and the heroes’s zombie-like versions shown in the climax are a bit scary for a kids movie.
• Narm:
  • The main villain’s name is ELMER. Not exactly the most threatening name, is it? Made even worse when characters say it out loud in moments that are meant to be serious.
  • During Elmer and Garras’s first transformation, there’s a brief shot of a kid drinking a very realistic-looking juice box (specifically, Herbez, a popular vegetable juice brand in Mexico) in a very blatant case of Product Placement… in the movie’s CLIMAX no less!
  • The movie’s message at the end where it says “if you have faith, you’ll soon find your own Brije” is meant to be an uplifting message aimed at the viewers... but there’s just one problem: BRIJES DON’T EXIST IN REAL LIFE.
  • More than one English-speaking viewer has said that the subpar English dub really doesn’t help an already very flawed movie.
  • The implication that Hernán Cortés (a real-life conqueror, mind you) used a demonic parrot who looks like a Digimon knock-off to conquer America is too ridiculous to be taken seriously.
  • For all the talk about how “complicated and secret” the ritual of the Sincronia is, the fact that the main characters manage to master it so quickly by sheer convenience really undermines it and makes the villains look like idiots for not realizing how easy it is.
  • The Umbra Cameo’s sporadic and violent jump scare-like spasms feel like they were trying too hard to make it look scary and unhinged.
  • Elmer’s deaths (yes, he’s beaten TWICE in the climax) are so overblown that it makes it look like they were trying too hard to make them look epic like the deaths in anime like Dragon Ball or Saint Seiya. For starters, his first death somehow creates a mushroom cloud in mid-air while his second death is just him dissolving while lots of explosions and energy balls keep coming from the same spot, even though he's already gone by that point.
• One-Scene Wonder: Characters like Anubis and Zompul Balam only appear in one scene but they manage to be memorable.
• Questionable Casting: In the English dub, it's pretty clear that it was made on the cheap and all the actors are actually Mexicans or at least Latinos with varying degrees of English. That's all well and good and most of the do sound like how you'd expect the characters to sound, stilted performances aside... except for Freddy who, for some reason, is voiced by Patricia Azan, a veteran Miami-based Cuban actress who does have experience voicing young boys... problem is, she decided to use a wonky English version of her Eric Cartman voice. Needless to say, hearing Latin Spanish Cartman's voice coming out of a Shonen-esque hero like Freddy makes it EXTREMELY hard to take him seriously.
• Special Effect Failure: The movie had a VERY low budget for the animation and it shows.
  • There’s a LOT of digital zooming, which makes a lot of the image look very blurry. This is most notable during Garras’s introduction. Now, remember that this was shown on a big screen.
  • The CG rock wolf looks very outdated even for 2010. To make matters worse, when Kimo and Cloko’s warrior form is grabbing its tail, it doesn’t even look like he’s grabbing it.
  • Speaking of the CGI, they didn't do a good job making the flat 2D characters blend with the obviously 3D backgrounds.
  • At the beginning, during the part showing the Spaniard Conquistadores conquering America, Hernán Cortés and his assistant are both drawn in completely different styles, with Cortés having black outlines while his assistant lacks them completely. It's very distracting.
  • In the scenes showing a lot of Brijes together, it’s very obvious they were all drawn and animated by different artists because they don’t look like they belong in the same movie. It’s even worse in the climax because they’re all static images.
• Tear Jerker: The explanation for why Mutey doesn't speak. An incident in the past that's vaguely implied to be either rape, or at least some kind of assault.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Or, rather, a perfectly good voice actor. Colmillos is voiced by veteran Mexican VA Jesse Conde… and he only gets one line of dialogue in the whole movie.
  • A LOT of people wished the movie was about Puas, Mudita and Zejas as they’re way more interesting (if a bit generic) than the boring stock protagonists.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: For how dull and generic the story and characters are, all the Mexican voice actors really give it their all.
• Values Dissonance: The fact that the mute character is called “Mudita” (“Mutey" in the English dub) by her friends has been called out by some US reviewers, especially The Cartoon Hero, as being tasteless and ableist. In reality, in Mexico and most Latin American countries, it is very common for close friends to refer to each other with affectionate names that would otherwise be considered mean or offensive, especially if they're based on disabilities (ie, calling a fat man “Fatso,” a one-eyed girl "Cyclops" and yes, even calling a dark-skinned person the N-word even if you’re white).

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