Little Foot (2020) - Movie Review

Well, after years of subjecting myself to all manner of bad animated movies for kids, I think I’ve found the absolute nadir. The certified, inarguable, objective worst of the lot. So let’s get right into it.

This film isn’t so much low-budget as much as it is no­-budget. The character designs vary from generic to the kind of nightmare fuel you find after clicking on one too many suggested videos on YouTube, but this goes one further and barely even animates them in the first place. To cover up how there’s pretty much only one animation loop for each character talking, they’ll just cut to a different loop of another character doing nothing but staring into your soul:

It’s so slapshod that the admittedly okay-looking backgrounds are extremely suspect, as if they were bought wholesale from elsewhere, because they are immensely better-rendered than the stock footage creatures standing in front of them. I mean, they’re only computer screensaver quality, but that is still a marked improvement over this film’s ghastly depictions of Dracula, Cupid and the titular Little Foot.

Which brings us to the… I can’t even facetiously call this a ‘story’, as we never really get to see anything that gets brought up during the endless string of pointless conversations that is this movie. Ostensibly, it’s about Barkley Blunderbore, a giant who isn’t actually a giant who kidnaps all manner of fantastical creatures to put in his space zoo, while Little Foot sets out to stop him. But again, you won’t see a lick of any of that happening.

Instead, you’ll be subjected to a handful of voice actors trying desperately to make everyone sound distinct as they explain, with excruciating slothfulness, what is going on and that they need to do something, often on repeat for the entirety of a given scene. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to be seeing a moment where they explain anything; most of the time, they spend so much time riffing that it’s hard to imagine this even having a script in the first place.

It’s a film that barely scrapes in at 70 minutes, and even that is far too much time for these people to fill in with anything worth watching. It initially sparks some laughs of disbelief at just how shoddy this all is, but once it sinks in that that is literally all there is to see with this, that laughter gives way to grimaces-a-plenty. And in conjunction with the wonky sound mixing, the utter void of anything actually happening, and the idea that Count Dracula infiltrating a space circus would be the most boring thing on Earth (possibly why it’s one of many things we’re never shown), it makes pretty much every talking animal movie I’ve ever railed against on here look like cinematic gold by comparison.

 

This is astoundingly shite, to the point where I can’t even reasonably suggest this for bad movie night, as it turns into a Herculean test of patience in record time.