Happily N'Ever After 2: Snow White—Another Bite @ the Apple

NOTE: This was copied and pasted from AMW (save for a few modifications here and there).

Happily N'Ever After 2: Snow White—Another Bite @ the Apple

Basically one of the main reasons why Lionsgate is not capable of distributing animated movies.

Genre:	Adventure
Directed By:	Steven E. Gordon Boyd Kirkland
Produced By:	Loris Kramer Lunsford Jason Netter
Written By:	Chris Denk
Starring:	Helen Niedwick Cam Clarke Jim Sullivan Kirk Thronton Cindy Robinson David Lodge Catherine Lavin Doug Stone Doug Erholtz Lex Lang Kate Higgins G.K. Bowes Jennie Fahn Todd Haberkorn Colleen O'Shaughnessey Michael Sinterniklaas Cassandra Lee Morris Laura Bailey
Distributed By:	Kickstart Productions Berlin Animation Film Karactaz Animation Lionsgate Home Entertainment
Release Date:	February 17, 2009 (Australia) March 24, 2009 (United States)
Runtime:	75 minutes
Country:	United States Germany
Language:	English
Prequel:	Happily N'Ever After

Happily N'Ever After 2: Snow White—Another Bite at the Apple is a 2009 computer-animated direct-to-video film and sequel to Happily N'Ever After released on DVD on March 24, 2009, which features the voices of Helen Niedwick, Cam Clarke, Jim Sullivan, Kirk Thornton, Cindy Robinson, David Lodge, and Catherine Lavin. Mambo, Munk, Little Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin, the Fairy Godmother, The Big Bad Wolf, The Trolls, Sleeping Beauty, the Amigos, and the Dwarves are the only characters to return from the first film. None of the cast members returned for this film.

Plot

Snow White is too busy having fun with her friends Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and Little Bo Peep to attend to her royal duties. However, when her father is set to remarry to Lady Vain, Snow White now has to find a way to deal with the scheming witch.

Why It Still Lived Happily NEVER After

1. This sequel basically worsened most of the problems from the original, but takes this up to extremes, due to the various problems as listed below.
2. The CGI animation looks very cheap, choppy, robotic, jagged, outdated, dull, weak, ugly, and lazy, especially for 2009 standards, to the point where it looks like it was made by Vídeo Brinquedo or Xing Xing Digital.
   • Depending on your view, the original film (while still looking low quality and choppy) has better CGI animation than this movie as it had more effort put into its animation quality.
   • The CGI models (especially the animal characters (in which; to quote Phantomstrider who said they look like they're coming from a McDonald's Happy Meal toybox), Rumpelstiltskin, Lady Vain's true form, and her mother) are even uglier and uncanny than the ones in the first film with creepy and soulless facial expressions which were a major downgrade compared to the original and really stiff character movements to the point where the character models from the first film looked a lot better and less creepy than how they rendered in the sequel, a perfect example for how weird-looking the character movements are when the townspeople were dancing at the wedding, their dancing movements look awkward due to the cheap animation, a female character even twerked on screen.
   • During some shots where the crowds were far behind from the screen, the CGI models of the crowds were very graphically low quality.
   • The lip-syncing as well as the mouth movements are completely off at times and don't match what the characters are saying.
   • Most of the computer graphics and visual effects also suffered from lightning and rendering issues which make them look brighter that can affect the viewers' vision.
   • The lightning and rendering are even abysmal than the first film, and sometimes, the lighting and rendering are non-existent in some scenes which make the characters look even nightmarish.
   • Due to the extremely low quality CGI animation, there are so many mountains of animation errors that appeared to be easily more noticeable than that of the original even to the point where several direct to video CGI animated films wouldn’t gone that far when it comes to animation errors like for example;
     • When King Cole is offered a drink from Grimm, he picks it up, turns around, and puts it back down without even taking a sip, possibly due to not including a slipping sound from the king.
     • Numerous clipping and layering issues with the character and object models. Two examples are when Snow White fell in the mud puddle when she was chasing the children from the old woman's shoe during baby-sitting, the body that is on the mud puddle is clipping through the ground and during Snow White's rude speech, one of her eyes clipped through her eyelid.
     • The background characters sometimes weren't probably animated, especially during the scene where Goldilocks was talking to Peter, and when she went to Snow White, two women behind them moves way too early before the background moves and then the woman disappears too early in one frame which shows that the animatiors didn't try to animate the background characters properly.
     • Snow White's feet when she got out of bed to look like if someone sawed feet from a corpse and then sewed them onto her.
     • A lot of characters and objects such as Snow White's stuff on her desk magically appear and disappear in other scenes without any reason.
     • In one scene where Snow White and Peter were dancing together, the background was completely black like an animation test which eventually changed back to normal in the next shot.
     • Lady Vain's dress magically changes in two scenes where Lady Vain received a royal robe, she's wearing her casual outfit, but she's wearing her wedding dress afterward and after the magic mirror was destroyed and when Lady Vain got changed back to her true form, her dress was changed back to her casual dress for no apparent reason.
     • In scenes featuring crowds, the people behind a lot of characters often switched places or reused between crowd scenes.
     • When Peter leaves Snow White and Goldilocks, he was walking behind Miss Muffet, but the next shot showed him going near her to dance with him.
     • Some objects often change positions, places, shapes, or colors which eventually changed back, two examples are the giant glass ball with scales was behind Munk, but they were next to the stairs when Mambo goes downstairs and the little girl's teddy bear was changed to a stuffed bunny due to its ears being changed in two scenes.
     • When Grimm leaves King Cole behind the kitchen to find him a queen, his arm glitches from behind his back when he closes the door.
   • This is also unexceptionable for all these qualities, as Happily N’Ever After 2 came out in 2009, the same year that films such as Pixar’s Up, the Wes Anderson adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Princess and the Frog, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs were made not too long later after this film's released, and they look way better than this.
3. The idea of a sequel was really pointless, as the original already has a good ending where Frieda and the fairy tale villains were defeated and Ella and Rick were married. Not to mention that the original didn't make enough money at the box office for a sequel, this is properly because Lionsgate and Berlin Animation Film downgrading the quality that the original has, mostly the animation to make more money at the direct to video market as well as cashing in on Hoodwinked's low budget charm and success.
4. Vanguard Animation and the crew from the first film (besides a few of them such as Richard Rich and the film's composer, Paul Buckley) weren’t involved in this production, instead, the production has to go with Kickstart Productions as a replacement for Vanguard, making this movie more like a reboot than an actual sequel.
   • By comparison, Space Chimps 2: Zartog Strikes Back, another sequel of a Vanguard film at least has Vanguard Animation and some of the crew members being involved.
5. Bad and clichéd writing and story which is a generic "teenage family drama" only with some story elements copied straight from Snow White, the first three Shrek films, The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning, Bratz: The Movie and The Lion King II: Simba's Pride. In fact, this movie was written by Chris Denk who would later write the first Alpha and Omega movie.
   • Snow White is given a generic teenage story which is already done in better films.
   • Over usage of clichés such as the "death of the main character’s parent as a child", "the villain redeemed out of nowhere after being defeated" and the generic "dance party" ending.
6. While Mambo, Munk, Little Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin, the Fairy Godmother, the Big Bad Wolf, the Trolls, Sleeping Beauty, the Amigos, and the Dwarves return, most of the characters from the first film (especially the major characters) were either absent entirely without any explanation, reduced to cameos, being mentioned by some characters or just being retooled as if they never even exist in the sequel and were replaced by even more uninteresting, annoying and unlikable newer characters that are actually rehashes of the characters who appear in the original, there are some examples.
   • The main protagonist from the first film, Ella is reduced to two cameos and a few mentions from other characters and is replaced by Snow White who was a stereotypical teenage girl who often cares about hanging out with her friends, is obsessed with her beautiful looks and disobeying her father into getting her own way after her mother died when she was young and later developed into a kind and caring girl just like her late mother. She is often coming off as a cheap version of Kayley from Quest For Camelot and Ariel from The Little Mermaid.
   • Rick, one of the two love interests of Ella along with Humperdink in the first movie is reduced to two cameos and replaced by Sir Peter who, while likable, is basically a carbon copy of Rick from the first movie as both has the same character model and personality as Rick (with the differences being the hair, shirt and even colors of his clothing) which clearly shows how lazy the animators really are.
   • Frieda is replaced by Lady Vain who is basically a mean popular girl knockoff of Ursula/Vanessa from The Little Mermaid, Scar from The Lion King, Lord Farquaad from Shrek, Queen Beryl from Sailor Moon and Queen Chrysalis from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, this replacement is excusable since Frieda got sent to another dimension with Elephant Seals by Ella in the first film, not to mention that her motivation to marry King Cole is not just generic, but also really inappropriately disturbing, especially since King Cole is a lot older than her at the time of Queen Grace’s death, and that would make King Cole seemed like a sexual predator, even the fact that Lady Vain aged up to Queen Grace’s age using her magic mirror doesn’t help the age gap.
   • The Wizard is nowhere to been seen nor mentioned in this sequel and is replaced by King Cole who is an unlikable clone of King Stefan from Sleeping Beauty who acts very overprotective towards his daughter and thinks that Lady Vain looks like his wife when he doesn’t even know her according to Snow White which is also excusable since the Wizard's voice actor, George Carlin, who passed away in 2008, when they could've just hired another voice actor to replace him as the Wizard just like what Cars 2 did with Fillmore when Lloyd Sherr replaces Carlin as the new voice of him two years later).
   • Prince Humperdink only gets a single mention under "Prince Charming" during Snow White's rude speech and is also replaced by Grimm which is possibly excusable since his voice actor, Patrick Warburton was busy with Space Chimps at the time.
7. The absence of most of the old characters lead to many continuity errors that seemed to have contradicted the events of the first movie.
   • In the first movie, Rick, Prince Humperdink, and the Wizard lived in the castle, but in this movie, however, Snow White, King Cole, Queen Grace, and Grimm all live in the same castle that the former three characters are living in the first movie, this movie also never even explains on how those four characters took these three characters' place as the owners of the castle though Rick and the Wizard's reasons why they moved out of the castle were excusable since Rick was married to Ella and lived in a house that the Fairy Godmother builds for them in the deleted scene of the first film and the Wizard possibly died before the events of the sequel giving his role to Munk and Mambo as the rulers of the kingdom like in the first movie.
   • At the end of the first film, the villains are forced to move out of the kingdom, but a few villains like the Trolls and Big Bad Wolf appeared on the opening night of the Joust house meaning that they possibly came back to change their ways.
   • In this movie, the Dwarves know Queen Grace when she was still alive though she’s never even seen the Dwarves in the first movie.
   • During the finding a wife for King Cole montage, Sleeping Beauty was seen being part of the wife choosing tryout even though she already has a prince as her love interest in the first movie.
   • In two of the photo-ops, the stepsisters from the first movie appeared to have dates with the trolls and the woman falling in love with the Fat Wolf despite the three women not knowing and were scared of the villains.
   • During the climax, Munk, and Mambo were sent to the scales area which is next to the wedding when it’s actually upstairs in the first film.
8. Speaking of the returning characters, a few of them (except the seven Dwarves and Munk who were heavily improved) were flanderized beyond belief, making them acted very differently from how they are from the first movie.
   • Mambo went from an annoying, yet helpful troublemaking cat who wanted to make stories a bit different to more annoying than the first film and he and Munk are completely useless in the sequel who are only used for filler, unlike the original film where both of them were helpful to the plot by siding with Ella and Rick to stop Frieda from taking over the kingdom.
     • He's also at his worst in the sequel as he broke the story scales, trying to fix the glitch while Munk is asleep and was responsible for the story to get worst after Snow White decided to go late-night dancing with the Damsels when she's supposed to come back to the castle before the rooster crows.
   • Rumpelstiltskin is turned back into a secondary villain after he redeemed himself at the end of the first film who only cares about his beautiful wig and Lady Vain's appearance than anything else (including the baby from the first movie), also his new voice actor (David Lodge) made him sound nothing like his other voice actor (Michael McShane) from the first film.
   • Little Red Riding Hood went from a cute little girl who was badly hurt by a wolf disguising as her granny to a stereotypical snazzy teenager who barely looks nor sound anything like she did from the first film, she also makes fun of Sir Peter (who is in his knight armor) by saying an unfunny Shrek reference.
   • The Fairy Godmother is dumped down from being a dimwitted fairy who forgot Cinderella's name and turning her into a pumpkin in the first film, to being an owner of a marriage service that forces people to sign a long-form in order of getting a wife/husband.
9. Low production values: Some characters have their models (including those from the first movie) being lazily recycled for some newer characters only with their designs and colors being alternated, for example, Lady Vain reuses Queen Grace's model for her beautiful form, the children from There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe all reuse the same models, making them more as clones expect with the shirt colors, Grimm reuses Prince Humperdink's servant's model expect with the hat, beard, long pants, shoes, and different colors, the three men (the butcher, the candlestick maker and the chef) reused all three models of the Amigos, and Peter refuses Rick’s model from the first movie, but with different hair and long white sleeved shirt and the colors (as mentioned earlier).
   • The crowd scenes also suffered from this as there were background characters with the same models, yet the animators don't even bother to change the designs or colors just like what they did with some of the models.
   • Some characters have also given stolen character designs from other media such as Snow White who has the same model and colors as Disney's version of Snow White but wears modern teenage clothes, King Cole who looks a lot like King Stefan from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty wearing a Burger King crown and Miss Muffet who looks like a Strawberry Shortcake reject.
   • Red Riding Hood, rather than keeping her original look for her teenage form, has her skin and race changed to Latin-Mexican as opposed to American-German like she did in the original film for an unexplained reason which comes off as blackwashing.
10. Insulting and offensive comedy which insults other Fairy Tales and various media (such as the "Shrek" joke and the infamous "It's called too much gingerbread, honey" line).
11. The timing of this movie seems extremely off, as they try to make comedy by using poorly-timed sound effects in certain scenes.
12. Terrible voice acting, mainly due to almost none of the voice actors from the original reprise their roles in this sequel and only has voice actors from English anime dubs such as Cam Clarke, Kirk Thornton, Cindy Robinson, Lex Lang, David Lodge, and Kate Higgins, making the returning characters sound nothing like their other voice actors (especially Munk, Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood and the Dwarves whose new voice actors barley sound anything like Wallace Shawn, Michael McShane, Kath Soucie, John DiMaggio, and Tom Kenny). It's either because all of the voice actors from the first film didn't want to return for the sequel after how the first film turned out or they were too expensive to bring back mainly for its low budget.
13. Very poor grasp of the original film since it has almost no connection to the original movie, making it feel like more of a stand-alone sequel.
14. Misleading Title: Despite being called Happily N'Ever After 2: Snow White—Another Bite @ the Apple, the film barely has any connection to its prequel other than the returning characters and Ella and Rick being a couple.
    • Even the subtitle is misleading since Snow White is barely seen or mentioned in the original film as she doesn't take another bite at the apple, even the @ symbol was only in the title just to pander 2000s internet people.
    • Another example of 2000s internet pandering is where the characters overuse the word, "Holla" many times to the point where it comes off as annoying for some people.
15. Parts of the editing are really poor, to the point where one can easily tell that parts of the plot were changed at the last minute; for example, Snow White was being forced to clean Miss Muffet's attic by the Dwarves, but it fades to black before Snow White could even clean it and then cuts to the bride choosing man telling Lady Vain to pick a wedding dress for her wedding night.
16. Random photos, including screenshots from the movie, appear in Snow White’s room, mainly due to the CGI animation being outsourced from Australia.
17. The movie can be mean-spirited at times such as Snow White saying very mean things to the entire town including her damsels, Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, and Little Bo Peep.
18. Major plotholes: Why some of the townspeople were nice to Snow White two to three days after they're mad at her for saying mean things at them which caused her to run away?
    • If Cinderella and Prince Charming were mentioned during Snow White's rude speech, then why didn't they appear in town after that?
    • How did Munk and Mambo land in the scales area after Lady Vain defeated them at the wedding when it’s just upstairs from the ballroom to the scales controlling area in the first movie?
19. Unnecessary use of anachronism despite the film set in a kingdom of fairy tales and nursery rhymes such as Snow White and her damsels having 2000s Samsung cell flip phones with a floating glass ball as video chat, Grimm showing the Fairy Godmother his Royal Assistant business card with his name on it, people taking autographs of the Damsels while on the red carpet, King Cole showing Snow White the newspaper that says "Snow White Cuts Line" and Rumpelstiltskin wearing his Elvis Parsley wig while giving Snow White a fake makeover.
20. Loads of padding such as the Munk and Mambo scenes, that only serve to pad out the running time of the movie.
    • It's somewhat 12 minutes shorter than the original since the sequel was 75 minutes while the original was 87 minutes.

Redeeming Qualities

1. Some of the newer characters are likable such as Sir Peter (despite being a bootleg clone of Rick from the first movie), Grimm, and Queen Grace (who sadly felt sick and died by kissing frogs).
   • At least Munk and Dwarves were more likable than they were in the first movie.
2. It does have good morals such as "only the mirror tells half of the story" and "true beauty is by helping others".
3. It was never intended to be in theaters, unless they had it on DVD.
4. The soundtrack and songs, despite being forgettable and dated, is at least decent thanks to Paul Buckley returning to compose this film.
   • Speaking of, a few crew members from the first film returned for this sequel such as Richard Rich who returned as executive producer which is surprising since most of the crew members from the first film were replaced.

Reception

Happily N'Ever After 2: Snow White—Another Bite @ the Apple was almost universally panned by critics (much like the first movie) and some fans of the original film mainly for its cheaply done animation (especially when compared to other superior animated films that came around the same year) and writing that failed to follow the events of its prequel. It was considered to be if not, one of the worst animated films of 2009 and its golden year of animated films, it has a 3.6/10 on IMDb which was even worse than the first movie's 4.5/10, as well as a 2/5 on Common Sense Media, a 1.7 on Letterboxd, and a 21% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

PhantomStrider and Animat placed it as the third and fourth worst animated sequel (tied with Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil in Animat's list) in their Top 10 Worst Animated Sequels, criticizing it for its laughable and ugly Vídeo Brinquedo like CGI and Animation which is dangerously close to the Foodfight! category respectively, clichéd writing, annoying characters and barely any connection to the first movie.

Comments

Loading comments...