Caroline and the Magic Potion
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
| Caroline and the Magic Potion | ||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 No wonder Coraline hates being called "Caroline" so much...
| ||||||||||||||||||
|
Caroline and the Magic Potion (originally released in July 11, 2014 as Brujerías, Spanish for Witchcrafts) is a Spanish computer-animated fantasy film directed by Virginia Curiá and released in 2015.
Plot
While working with her grandmother Lalilas (known as "Granny" in the English dub), Malva (known in English as "Caroline") comes across a magic potion that can make her fly. She becomes interested in using it in order to impress her mentor Selu. In the meantime, Rufa, owner of a cosmetics company, kidnaps Lalilas in order to obtain the secret formula she uses for her natural remedies. So in order to save her grandmother, Malva, along with Selu and her cat Mus, embark on a magical adventure to stop Rufa and her goons.
Why It's No Magic
- To get the elephant out of the room, the whole film is marketed as a blatant rip-off of Laika's 2009 stop-motion animated movie Coraline, even though it has virtually nothing to do with the actual movie itself. The most obvious example is the protagonist, Malva, who, aside from being a blatant lookalike of Coraline Jones, is renamed "Caroline" to add further confusion. On top of this, the title was changed from Brujerías to Caroline and the Magic Potion in order to cash in on Coraline's success.
- Plus, some of the elements in this movie were copied from other sources.
- Take, for instance, the singing snails are carbon copies of the slugs from Flushed Away, on top of being pointless like the Minions from Despicable Me. Even the movie itself points out how annoying they are!
- The plot itself is similar to Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil, where there's a granddaughter saving her grandmother from a blond-haired villain. Sound familiar?
- And the bottle looks strangely similar to the one from I Dream of Jeannie.
- Most of the scenes are uncomfortable to watch, like the scene where Rufa sprays a substance that 'shrinks her breasts and buttocks for some reason.
- Also, there's a recurring plot point where Malva, a child, is crushing on Selu, an adult, who in turn, is crushing on her. At one point, when Malva's grandmother takes her phone away, it's outright revealed that her that he tracked down her and her grandmother's van and was following them. Where's the FBI when you need them?
- The CGI animation can be cheap, lazy and unfinished, even for 2014 standards.
- Even the CGI animation quality hasn't aged well ranging from poorly made in Maya to just plain weird.
- It's unbelievable that a 2014 CGI-animated movie like this has cheap animation, considering that Big Hero 6, How to Train Your Dragon 2, The Lego Movie, Penguins of Madagascar, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Rio 2, Planes: Fire & Rescue, The Nut Job and The Boxtrolls which all came out the same year as this film and has animation thirty times better than this.
- The English dub is absolutely horrendous. Not only is the lip-syncing incredibly off track, but the delivery is also even worse. The voice acting ranges from flat/dull, to outright terrible, particularly with Rufa.
- Like when Rufa is talking about her spray can she stole, her laugh afterward sounds extremely stilted and robotic.
- And one of Malva's lines is "Fly away, fly away, fly away!", which is one of the stupidest lines ever spoken in this movie.
- The character designs can be pretty uncanny to look at and haven't aged that well. They also look like Funko Pop/Nendoroid rejects.
- Generic and lackluster plot with confusing plot holes at times.
- One of the movie's songs has a lyric that states "You don't need a glider to fly", but no less than three minutes later, Malva is seen gliding through a group of butterflies.
- One of the scenes has Rufa trying to figure out how to hypnotize the main characters, yet there were hypnotic devices shown throughout the entire movie!
- Heck, there's even an environmental message thrown at the last second! Talk about cheap morals!
- The soundtrack is tacky and super generic, and the songs are not much better. Especially the aforementioned hypocritical "you don't need a glider to fly" song.
Redeeming Qualities
- The artwork shown in the credits is actually pretty cute since they look like they came from a storybook. In fact, the writer, Anxela Loureiro, is an author of children's books.
- The character designs, though simplistic, can be pretty nice to look at if the animation had more time put into it.
- As badly executed as it is, the animation does resemble the stop-motion look well enough, almost as if it was going for a Rankin/Bass-esque approach.
Videos
The Movie
Reviews
Comments
Loading comments...