Director: Nelson Shin, Melanie Simka
Distributor: Splendid Film
Duration: 87 min
Frog Kingdom (Blu-ray) – Movie Review
A while ago, we got the chance to present you the story of ‘Ribbit’, a frog that has some personality issues. This time, we dive into the pond of ‘Frog Kingdom’. Princess Froglegs has a great idea to dodge her father’s wishes, but will it really be that simple?
Everything is nice and cosy in Froggyville, as they are preparing everything for the Froglympics. The King (Keith David) of Frog Kingdom has set a big price for the winner: the marriage with Princess Froglegs (Bella Thorne). Her pleas to cancel the event falls in deaf ears and she decides to take her fate into her own hands. As only men can actually compete for her hand, she and her best friend dress up like male frogs and sign up for the challenge themselves.
During this time, they find the travelling cook Freddy (Cameron Dallas) as he is selling baked wings. There are a lot of customers but one of them is particularly interested in Freddy’s pet fly: Thelma. Both Freddy and his sidekick don’t really like this idea and the game is on. What they didn’t foresee was that they were facing Froggy Ababwa (Mychal Simka), a rich prince from a faraway pond. After a bit of basketball with the fly, Freddy and his companions start running around, chased by a big turtle.
While there are having their rundown in the field, the competition started and it seems that Princess Froglegs is quite the favourite, although a lot goes wrong during the different disciplines. Freddy and his crew go running wild on the event, whilst rocking everything and ending first place. On the other hand, a crew of evil toads appear, trying to ruin the party. After this day, every finalist can go to a special boot camp. Things go mayhem as well, but that is something you will have to watch yourself.
Overall, the story in the movie might make your eyebrows go up more than once. For instance, there is so much chaos during the Froglympics that is it hard to follow who is doing what and what is actually happening. There are loads of moments that doesn’t have a story value whatsoever and it might be better if they weren’t implemented. The chaotic scenes seem to diminish when the narrative advances so if you want to know how the story ends, bear with it.
This being said, the flow of the movie isn’t that consistent as well. The start might seem really fast-paced and, again, chaotic but goes to a slowpoke pace when the finalists go on their boot camp. This changing pace in combination with the quite peculiar story makes Frog Kingdom a bit incoherent and hard to follow.
As this is an animation, we can only talk about the voice acting and lip syncing. The available voices were quite okay and fit the setting: crazy frogs in a pond. At least we had a lot of good voice actors like Keith David (Adventure Time, Greenleaf) and Bella Thorne (Metegol, Big Love) that already have loads of experience. What really was off was the lip syncing. To be quite blunt, this was horrible. A lot of the times, the animals where talking, but you saw no lip movement whatsoever. Heck, there weren’t even emotions visible most of the times. This is something that could have been a lot better and it really takes down the quality of the movie.
The rest of the animations are a lot better, which makes it a shame that the lip syncing and emotions are so off. A lot of the visuals seem quite realistic and you notice that they did their best to make a fun, colourful environment. Each frog, toad or other animal have their particular characteristics but they don’t really stand out against the rest.
The only extras on the disk are some trailers of other animation movies. A lot of them are already quite old and it’s a shame that there aren’t any recent or new ones. It would have been nice if there were other extras as well though.
Conclusion
Overall, we can say that Frog Kingdom is a combination of good and (a lot) of bad things. The weird, incoherent story at times, the absence of decent lip syncing and emotions and with the changing pace , it makes this animation movie quite a challenge to endure. The overall graphics are rather good and the voice acting itself make things better, but it isn’t sufficient enough to actually buy this release.
Frog Kingdom (Blu-ray) - Movie Review,
No Comments