A Fox's Tale

First of all, this movie is at the bottom 100 at IMDb already, but with the Hungarian name ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0830861/ ).

So, the director saw, what a piece of .... he made, and try to re-distribute it under an English title. You can see the comments on the other one, this is what I can say here too. The original Vuk was an all time classic, this one is a waste of money. Early 90's level animation, no storyline. Strange as it is, they had 1.6 billion Forints (10 mils USD) for this project, so they used it for something, but in a very eastern-European, non-professional way.

So, avoid it at all cost!! The only reason you'd be watching this is to get a good taste of how a movie can be awful!!

This movie is the same as the Kis Vuk, the only difference are the dubbed English voices. So by IMDb rules it shouldn't be listed as a separate movie. I guess the producers just wanted to start with a clean record, since Kis Vuk has a user rating of 1,6 after 2000+ votes, thus it's the worst flick in the animation category on IMDb.

And rightly so. This movie is just a blatant disgrace, especially if we consider that the original Vuk was so dear to so many people. It's nothing more but a shameful ripoff, a steal of state sponsorship money and it's a disgrace to the creators of the original movie. So I'm not surprised at all that it is now listed under a separate title. Fortunately you can't hide basic facts on the Internet.

Back in 1984, the folks who went on to create Pixar brought out their first short film, "André and Wally B. ". Its use of CGI was amazing for its day and it led to great things...at least for Pixar. In contrast, "A Fox's Tale" came out in 2008...and looked pretty similar in CGI quality to "André and Wally B."--which is appalling, as by 2008 CGI had improved exponentially and films like "Ratatouille" and "WALL-E" were the new norm. Yet, inexplicably, "A Fox's Tale" looks decades old and is just an incredibly cheap and ugly film.

This cheapness and ugliness of "A Fox's Tale" is exactly why it ended up on IMDB's old Bottom 100 list--the 100 lowest rated films on the website. However, the criteria for the list recently changed...and films required at least 10,000 votes to make the list....and "A Fox's Tale" only currently has about 8300 votes. Now a few years ago, I tried to find this film because I was trying to see as many of the old Bottom 100 as I could...and only recently has the film come to YouTube...so better late than never. Or, perhaps not.

So despite having very dated CGI, is the film worth seeing? No. The main problem is that the CGI is so ugly that watching it is a real chore. An ugly short film is bad enough...but in this case you have 85 minutes of eye-bleedingly ugly animation. Frankly, stick figures or sock puppets would have looked better! Then, when you add insipid songs, a story that is terrible and dead-looking humans that move like robots, it's a recipe for disaster...both for kids as well as adults. In fact, if I ever bought a copy of the film, it would be to use as punishment if my kids were bad...very, very, VERY bad!!

So is this the ugliest and most worthless CGI film I've ever seen? Well, that's tough call, as the standard of pure ugliness and awfulness is very low with films like "Foodfight!" also making this old Bottom 100 list. Suffice to say that it's about as bad as "Foodfight!" and is worthless in every possible way. An abysmal mess of a film that is so bad you have to see it to believe it! I score it 1 simply because IMDB doesn't allow 0.Pretty good computer animation for 1984...but it came out in 2008!

...and now, something completely different: the same nightmare with English voices: "A Fox's Tale (2008)" = "Kis Vuk (2008)" -> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0830861/ This so-called CG-movie is just not what it seems. Lets take a closer look (careful!), at first glance it looks like a CG-movie, with some cartoon animals and stuff. However, it is substandard by all means. A grand insult against the Hungarian CG- and cartoon industry. Quality is not amateurish - it would put a shame on most of the amateurs who ever tried to make a coloured teapot in 3dsmax. A clear show-off that nobody gave a fox about how it would be a movie. It was just business. And they had the money before they done anything with it. A flagship of the money laundering system, where politicians and producers steal from the citizens on every level of life. This is not a cartoon-film for children. This is a triumph of corruption.

I love animation, and have seen a lot of animated movies, old and new, good and bad. I only saw this out of curiosity, having seen many of my IMDb friends putting this movie on their worst animated movies list, so I wanted to see whether it was really that bad. And to me it was that bad. In fact I have not seen an animated movie this awful since about July with Space Thunder Kids. The animation is among the laziest I've seen, the character designs look ugly, no make that hideous, the colours are flat and the backgrounds and sceneries are horribly rendered. The writing is some of the worst I've heard in a long time, all the lines are banal, verging on preachy and very unfocused. The story is dull, futile and thin even for the running time. I will say I have seen the 1981 film Vuk(of which this is a sequel of), that was charming, well animated, beautifully voiced and written. This sequel is the complete opposite, not only does it "rip-off" the 1981 film but it completely fails to capture the spirit and style of it, let alone its heart. The voice work is poor, with the voices out of sync sometimes with the lip movements. This voice cast(Freddie Highmore, Bill Nighy, Miranda Richardson and Sienna Miller) is talented, but they are wasted with awful writing and dumb characters we don't give a toss about. Overall, just a mess. 1/10 Bethany Cox