Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir - Der Film

So I'll say first off, as the brother of two younger sisters who are (along with me) huge miraculous fans, we all thouroughly enjoyed this movie. It's a heavily abridged version of the show's story, but on its own it's a great movie (with absolutely INCREDIBLE animation) and it in many ways delivers on the promises that the show has failed to deliver over the last couple years.

All that being said, I do recommend watching this movie twice: once in your own language and once in french, because this IS a musical, and the songs sound INFINITELY better in their native language.

TLDR: Good Movie!

Those who are upset about it being a musical and it not aligning with the shows have not been paying attention the last 3 years of updates. They told us from the beginning it was a musical and that it wouldn't align with the shows storyline, so those placing bad reviews on that just didn't pay attention. But overall this film exceeded my expectations. The soundtrack is just beautiful. Especially Courage in Me. Phenomenal. The romantic tension was there and was beautiful. I will say I'm am very sad to see Ce Mur Qui Nous Sépare was not in it, but the rest of the soundtrack really made up for that. Jeremy did a phenomenal job with listening to what the fans want. I'm looking forward to a sequel 🤞

I feel the songs are just out of place. It is like the producers desperately wanted to make a hit movie like Frozen and therefore made it into a half musical. And the songwriters was probably told that each song must be a hit. So there is no balance between the songs. There are too many "heavy" prouction songs instead of a few heavy mixed with more light and simple songs.

Apart from the songs the movie was maybe a 6. The story was so so. It was too much focused on the love between Ladybug and Cat Noir. It was a bit unclear what the story was aiming for and why. So overall it is a messy movie. Well made when it comes to the animations but lack of a good story and filled with out of place musical songs.

Where to start? To begin with, let's look at the good parts; the animation and art was obviously SO much better than the series. The setting and characters weren't so generic and they all looked well made. Everything in this movie was so much more in depth than in the series. The art, the score (soundtrack), the animation, the fight scenes, the setting, the stakes were all so much better. Because the movie was basically an alternate storyline (parallel but not connected to the original) lots of details were changed. Now, I happened to like a lot of the changes. They showed how much more thought was put into this movie than the series. Like how the yo-yo got an upgrade and the way it operates made so much more sense. However, not all changes were for the better.

For instance, it's a ...musical for some reason..? I guess this was the creators' way of trying to make the movie more likable and trendy, but at least in the English version, the voice actors for the singing parts weren't all the same as the speaking parts and especially in Marinette it was VERY noticeable. It was like she was a completely different person! And why was the singing necessary anyway?

Music aside, the plot could have used some work. I mean, I'm a fan of the series, so my bar is already pretty low, but in a movie you expect more. Because this wasn't canon there were lots of little details that got swept under the rug and lots of stuff that just didn't make sense. Like after Marinette meets Tiki they have a whole musical conversation about how Marinette doesn't want to be Ladybug and at the end of it, all of a sudden there's a threat and the Yo-yo pulls her around the city to find it - that makes sense - but what doesn't make sense is when she gets to the location and meets Cat Noir she completely switches from "I'm not cut out for this" to "No, I'm not your sidekick, I'm Ladybug, the hero" I just...I don't know man. The movie was enjoyable to me purely for the sake of the art and the little details that were explained in a way that made so much more sense to me. They didn't go very in depth with the lore of the miraculous, but they did do a little bit more background on Gabriel and why he does these things, but the ending was so lackluster and didn't make so much sense. So...is it necessary to watch? No. Should you watch it? Probably not. But if you're obsessed with the characters and are the kind of person to look up fanart just to look at all the cute art styles, you might enjoy this movie just to see a different (slightly better) version of them.

The movie is okay to watch, the animation is definitely stunning. But the plot felt so, so bad. Everything felt so rushed and not well thought out. It didn't feel like we were following a timeline, instead it just felt like a recap of the show. Especially with jumping over all of those fights in the middle. And the songs definitely didn't help either. They felt so trashy and bad, almost like an info dump. They were only there to tell a story the movie couldn't show.

Overall all, it's a kids movie, so you really shouldn't have high expectations. But still, too rushed and all over the place for my taste.