The Christmas Tree

There are people out there who are actually very good at drawing cartoons. It's a talent or a gift they've had since early childhood, where they just seem better at drawing cartoon characters than the average kid, and the love and joy they get from their craft can only be described as highly intense. And as they grow up they wish to share their talents with others, and make a career out of doing what they love. But due to a lack of resources, problems with health, ability, or money their dreams fell like just that, only dreams. And then, they see THIS monstrosity of a cartoon with ZERO talent and effort put into it, and it's because it's so horrible that it gets so much attention! This is the human race in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen! A person like me, whose hopes and dreams of ever being a successful cartoon maker are crushed while, garbage like this gets put out for the world to see! People really don't value talent or skill anymore, after all it's just so much easier to crank out a total mess like this movie. What a stupid world!

With the right execution, a combination of an animation based around Christmas could have worked out well. Unfortunately with The Christmas Tree, the execution was just wrong and it didn't work out at all. The animation is, like the three terrible animated Titanic movies, terribly static, the character designs will leave kids traumatised, there is no fluidity(and little movement, for that matter), it looks very sparse and the colours are completely flat. The synthesised music is just as creepy as the character designs, has no warmth to it and for personal tastes doesn't fit at all. The dialogue is very corny and tired, further disadvantaged by the sloppy lip-synching(find a moment where the dialogue actually matches the lip movements actually). Every bit as bad is the voice acting, which is just as bad as the voice acting for the Video Brinquedo animations, which has some of the worst voice acting in all mankind. Monotone, garbled and wooden has been described, and those three words sum the voice acting up brilliantly, if there has been worse voice acting for children in any animation(film, show or special) I've yet to hear it. You don't identify with the characters one bit, they have dull or obnoxious personalities and how they're animated and voice further accentuate that, the titular character is almost completely sidelined. And the story screams of laziness, mean-spirited instead of heart-warming, dull instead of thrilling and full of padding that has no relevance whatsoever to what's happening in the first place. Admittedly the idea wasn't a particularly great or original one to begin with, but if The Christmas Tree was watchable at least that wouldn't have mattered. So in conclusion, as bad as has been said, even worse than Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer, Legend of Frosty the Snowman, Star Wars Holiday Special and Frosty Returns(Night B4 Christmas I remember hating as well). A disgrace to animation and you won't feel festive watching it. 1/10 Bethany Cox

To be fair, after I watched Doug Walker's review I expected this to be bad. And guess what? I was right. This is awful, stupid, poorly animated, poorly acted, and every bit as bad as I imagined. The plot goes like this. A new family arrives in town and the mother Judy (Karen Drygas) get's a job as an assistant to an evil Gestapo head of an orphanage, Mrs. Mavilda (Helen Quinn). But Judy decides that all the kids can have a good Christmas anyways. That sums up the plot. I won't explain anything else because I decided to take the time to make this review a full on rant about how awful this film is. The story is plain stupid, but honestly that is one of the redeeming qualities about the film. What really brings this crap storm is the acting. One end of the scale is Quinn who plays Mavilda, who pretty much screams at the top of her lungs and makes Nicolas Cage look subtle. On the opposite end of the scale are the child actors who make no effort whatsoever to put any kind of emotion in their characters. The other big problem is the animation which is really choppy and badly done. The film overall is just horrible! Let's just leave this pile of manure at that!

Never watching this thing again. Absolute garbage. This thing was so cheaply made that it's mainly just a slideshow of bad drawings with a narrator talking in the background. The voice acting was terrible. One of the kids was actually impossible to understand, because they evidently just recorded a little girl blabbering on about who knows what.

The adult actors are terrible as well. Their voice acting shows a severe lack of emotion. In one scene, a child goes missing, and when said child's mother finds out, her tone of voice says "Oh well. Could have been worse"

And the plot... let's not go there.

Is this movie good? Not by ANY means! It's horrible - poorly animated, poorly acted - but holy horse hooves if it's not entertaining.

My partner and I play this every Christmas while we set up our Christmas tree and make fun of how bad it is every year. That being said, it's kind of charming in that aspect. I look at this film as a comedy. If you go in with that mindset, you'll laugh your butt off.

If you go in expecting a Christmas classic, you'll be horribly disappointed. But if you go in expecting a bad animated film, you'll be delighted. It's hilarious and something to enjoy as a nice background film.