Jack and the Beanstalk

Brajke4.0

Miris đetinjstva!

Lou3.0

Is it a good film? Eh. But the nostalgia is top tier and Ambrose's constant crises speak to my soul.

Adam3.0

I watched this all the time as a kid and I recently hunted it down for nostalgia’s sake. Tonight I watched it for the first time in about sixteen years. The inner child in me had this visceral impulse to buy a copy of the film and enjoy a nice little nostalgia trip. But the film buff in me was wondering if, nostalgia aside, I might actually discover an underrated gem. A surprisingly inventive little film despite its obscurity. And.. yeah, it isn’t a great film. While the voice acting is mostly fine (mostly), the story and pacing are a little odd, and the characters are pretty flat. Aside from Jack himself (and maaayybe Dilly?), none of them are very endearing. The animation is quite inconsistent; sometimes it looks nice but there’s a lot of strange and awkward moments where the film resembles one of those cheap, direct-to-video Disney sequels. One of the bad ones. To be fair, I don’t think the budget was very high and I do get the impression that this film had a talented crew, simply doing their best with what they had. I feel similarly about the music; the songs sometimes have nice lyrics but the music itself often sounds like cheap MIDI. The backgrounds and colors are actually quite nice though! There’s a scene where they’re in a desert and the style of the background art reminds me of a Chuck Jones cartoon. I also find it funny how this film seemed to do Donkey from Shrek, years before Shrek happened. Ambrose is basically just the same character if he was a Brit instead of.. Eddie Murphy. Of course he’s nowhere near as funny, but he’s just as sensitive, clingy and whimpy. I remember finding him just delightful as a kid, watching it at age 23 I just wanted them to leave him in the woods. When all is said and done though, I cannot deny that revisiting this film was an enjoyable experience. For all of its strange missteps and flaws, this was a childhood favourite of mine and there were plenty of moments where I was hit by a sudden wave of nostalgia. This was a nice little trip down memory lane, well worth the €4 I spent to get it on eBay. If you’re a fan of obscure animated films, you might get a kick out of this!