For those who are fortunate enough not to know the existence of the hell spawn that is Vídeo Brinquedo, here is some back story: Vídeo Brinquedo is known as the Asylum of animation. Thy specialize themselves in making crappie knockoffs of much better movies (mostly Disney and Pixar) and put absolutely no effort into them. While not as infamous as Ratatoing and What's Up: Balloon to the rescue, The Little Princess School is still as bad as the other Vídeo Brinquedo movies. This film is an knockoff of the famous Disney Princesses (Snow White, Cinderella, Mulan, Tiana and Jasmine) up to the part that thy exactly look the same as their Disney counterparts. The story is not worth telling about. If you think that Disney is bad with the princess stereotype, Vídeo Brinquedo brings it back to the time when woman have no rights and are expected to be just beauty. The animation is bad, but it's Vídeo Brinquedo, so what do you expect. Stay away from this thing as possible. Your life is better when you do not know the existence of The Little Princess School.
... View MoreYou may question if you hate the animations of Video Brinquedo so much, why keep watching? The answer is curiosity, to see if they are capable of something tolerable(which they've yet to do). Also there is something compulsive in how bad Video Brinquedo's- coined The Asylum of animation for good reason- output is. So it's not as if I enjoy hating on them because that cannot be further from the truth. Little Princess School does nothing to change my mind about this company, it's not as bad as Ratatoing, Little Panda Fighter and Little Cars but like this review's summary says Little Princess School has everything that makes Video Brinquedo animations as horrible as they are.The animation looks like as ever it was done on the cheap. It is still very robotic, pacing-wise sloppy and the backgrounds are scrappy, the characters sometimes moving like they're part of a pop-up book, and most of the colours are flat. While the music is repetitive and unmemorable and that's at best too. The theme song has a nice voice singing it, but has truly banal lyrics(very rushed-sounding as well especially when singing Zade and Iria's names and with irrelevant phrases that don't even match the visuals like regarding "witches flying off the ground" and "dwarves and dragons all around") and is not catchy in the slightest. Little Princess School is very poorly written too. The dialogue is full of such inane, irrelevant chatter, sometimes sexist too("A princess has to be in great shape if she wants to do high stress shopping."), that it causes you to vomit. While the stories have no charm to them whatsoever, instead reading of a cheaply done cross-over of Disney Princesses and Winx Club(to a very lesser extent, the Disney Princesses though is so blatant it insults the intelligence).Coming back to the sexism too, you can even hear it in the theme song with the "learn to be beautiful" line, an implication of being used for being attractive, very like how a controlling husband would think. Back to the stories, as well as the lack of charm there is no originality and they go next to nowhere(with pointless scenes like the Magic Mirror one)- with nothing to learn from or relate to. Complete with far from subtle- blatant actually- references(or shall we say rip-offs) like with the magic apples(Snow White), a magic mirror(again Snow White), pumpkin carriage(Cinderella), a prince in the guise of a frog(The Frog Prince/Princess and the Frog) and a spinning wheel(Sleeping Beauty).There is nothing to like about the characters, they are as shallow, vapid and annoying as any other Video Brinquedo character, and are made out to air-headed, selfish and manipulative-horrible messaging to the main target audience. Iria is the absolute worst in this regard, though Zade is a contender for the blandest, no personality at all. The least horrible is Hime, which is saying little as she is still done in a stereotypical way like her own name. It's not just their personalities, it's their designs too, they're essentially the Disney princesses- Cindy being Cinderella, Hime being Mulan, Iria being Tiana, Zade being Jasmine and Bianca being Snow White- in cheap miniature form. Especially Iria, so much so that her movie The Frog Prince has sometimes been confused with the infinitely superior Disney film. Madame Drastic, yes the tired cliché of the school teacher everyone hates(think Miss Trunchball from Matilda or Miss Hardbroom from The Worst Witch), also looks eerily like the Wicked Queen from Snow White.Little Princess School's voice cast is better than most of most of those for Video Brinquedo's output- Veronica Taylor at least tries- but they are saddled with awful dialogue and some over-compensate. A shameful waste of talent really, something that honestly really annoys me. All in all, Video Brinquedo has done marginally worse but there is still absolutely nothing good about Little Princess School. 1/10 Bethany Cox
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