The Nutcracker Prince follows Clara during Christmas where she receives the gift of a nutcracker from her godfather, Uncle Drosselmeier. After her Uncle regales her with a story of how the nutcracker came to be, Clara finds herself involved in the confrontation between the nutcracker prince and the vengeful rat king.
Released in 1990 to poor reviews and box office failure, The Nutcracker Prince was an attempt by Canadian TV animation studio Lacewood Productions to make a feature length theatrical film. While the animation can look nice (at times), the movie never maintains a consistent tone and struggles with pacing and story structure. But despite the movie's many faults, it is probably the most faithful and complete telling of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King that served as the source material for the endearing ballet.
The movie makes a decent enough impression with some decent character designs who are competently animated, but as the movie goes on the movie's usage of flat blurry backgrounds and barren environments become very obvious. The movie has numerous scenes that are eerily empty, even when that shouldn't be the case. To make up for this, the movie haphazardly integrates the Nutcracker suite as part of the soundtrack, and while it can sometimes work, often times it feels like a way to add life to the scene to make up for a lack of life in the animation. The movie also takes an abrupt style change around the 15 minute mark when it tells the Nutcracker's backstory, and in an attempt to soften the darker moments from the source material the animation style mimics a simplistic more geometric style one associates with something like Jay Ward's Fractured Fairy Tales which completely takes us out of the story and just calls attention to itself. The sequence goes on for a while dealing with characters who have no bearing on the rest of the movie and no real purpose, and the actual plot of the movie doesn't start until around 48 minutes into this 68 minute movie (not including 5 minutes of credits).
The Nutcracker Prince just doesn't work. It doesn't have plot, characters, or stakes strong enough to carry itself to feature length, and its technical aspects seem more suited for television than a cinema (save for some individual moments here and there). I do give the movie credit for avoiding contemporaneous dialogue and trying to approach the Nutcracker from a different direction, but the movie just doesn't come together.
