Donkey Xote

My ten year old daughter and I just keep looking at each other in disbelief throughout this whole movie. The plot is awful, hard to follow, thrown together, and a big pile of crap, really. Attempts at humor are thrown in, random, and unfunny. This movie is BAD, and not in a good way. The animation is fairly decent, but as this kind of technology becomes more readily available for low budget producers, more junk of this kind will continue to be put out. It all seemed forced. They forced to get a plot line, they forced to get some humor, and they forced to create an emotional story that would draw the viewer in. I have to tell ya, they fail on every count.

While the animation and style of the movie aren't half bad, in fact (besides of background stuff and vegetation not exactly moving much and the characters seeming lifeless every now and then) it seems better than a lot other animated movies (except anything by Pixar or Dreamworks of course).

That said the writing is horrible, mainly because the story doesn't seem to make any sense WHATSOEVER. From what I gathered it seems to play a few years after Don Quixote's fight against the windmills and all of his adventures and the movie is to about 50% about Sancho's Donkey (thus called Donkey Xote). The actions and traits of the characters deviate from one scene to another and the story even gets into the bizarre at times.

For example we got a "bad guy", that isn't really evil... more conflicted or confused cause he wants to get famous. And he seems to be the kind of guy that believes the best way to make you leave a city would be to make everyone else disappear so you feel unwelcome, then block all the rivers and burn all the food so you'll have to leave after a while instead of say throwing you out directly... and while that might have some sort of style it's illogical and this movie is riddled with similar stuff. Also there's some of his minions that want to kill some of the protagonists at one point and after the heroes managed to save themselves, there doesn't seem to be any grudge and both parties just walk away.

With a decent script this could've been a nice animated movie similar to say Shrek but as it stands right now it's somewhere between a 3-4 for me.

From Spain's Barcelona comes a charming and hilarious animated film called 'Donkey Xote'. The title is a reference to Don Quixote (one of the oldest romance-adventure novels). The film has been dubbed in several languages and it is done wonderfully. The plot is a bit strange but the characters are very likable, especially the animals. I feel that a comedy loses much of its humour when dubbed (due to lost in translation) but here it really worked. 'Donkey Xote' works excellently as an English language film but I prefer to watch it in the original Catalan language. The adult humour and other situational comedy provide some laugh out loud moments. This film probably might have done good business internationally, had it been marketed that way. The animation isn't of Pixar or Dreamworks quality but there's plenty more other things to keep one thoroughly entertained. I also loved the numerous references to other movies and pop-culture and the way they were used in the story. The makers were clearly inspired by 'Shrek' (the makers mention it) but much of 'Donkey Xote' even exceeds the charm of its source of inspiration. The last few animated films that I have seen of Spain have been of average quality at best but 'Donkey Xote' is a film with heart and it shows potential that Spain may not be too far behind in the animated films market when compared to America and Japan.

I've just seen the English dubbed Spanish DVD. With Pixar raising the bar and Disney and others raising their game to produce high quality animated movies with great stories it is hard to comprehend how this got made. The animation is fine but the story ... oh dear. Set some time after the well known story of Don Quixote this follows the same group as they try to find Dulcinea but the story is told from the point of view of their steeds - a brave donkey and a cowardly horse. Was this only made with Government/European Union taxpayer subsidies to help the Spanish film industry (a 'europudding')? I suspect so as the number of logos appearing in the credits is amazing. If you are a fan of Don Quixote you won't like this - If you aren't a fan you still won't like this!

Another reviewer wonders whether this is just drinking up EU subsidies, and I have to admit that a rare Spanish venture in animation ended up in a disaster.

One - animation is decent, although animals look like old Pixar and Dreamworks, or clones of them * especially the donkey, who is 99% Shrek's Donkey, and the hen, very much like in 'for the birds'.

Two - a very complex storyline, based on a very long book with a difficult plot and many subplots... that wasn't a good idea for a cartoon, which gets lost Three - some good second level jokes and some good first level jokes.

Overall... too hard for kids, too long, too convoluted. Pity they hired decent animators but poor editors and script writers.