The Legend of the Titanic (1999)

Currently, this Italian animated film is #28 on IMDb's infamous Bottom 100 list. In some ways, I am very surprised since it's not a particularly famous bad film and there were a lot of animated films in the 1970s which had just as terrible animation! Still, I do concede that it's a bad film...and not one I'd let kids watch unless I hated them.

The film begins with a grandpa mouse telling his grandkids his story about the Titanic. Oddly, then the film switches to the perspective of all the humans! What follows is a bizarro story of evil sharks and a scheme to destroy the whales?! Huh...somehow I missed this when I've watched documentaries about this 1912 disaster!

Let's talk about what I really liked about the film... Okay, finished.

Okay, now let's talk about what I didn't like. The animation was very poor, with a very low cel count (making the characters move in a choppy fashion) and often only animated small portions of the characters in an effort to make the film less expensive. So, often the characters expressions were flat and a bit zombie-like. Also, to save money, bad CGI was sometimes used that looked so stunningly different from the other animation that I was a bit surprised. This sure ain't a Disney product! In many ways, it's akin to the cheaper Hanna-Barbera films of decades ago. The story was just bizarre and stupid...'nuff said about that. The voices used were occasionally not terrible. As for the music, it was odd to hear so much cheap electronic music (made using a keyboard) for a film set in 1912.

So my final verdict is that I did hate the film. But I still wonder how it made it to the Bottom 100 list. After all, there have been a lot of crappy cartoons (such as "Pinocchio in Outer Space")....so why did this one manage to achieve the notoriety of the Bottom 100 list? I'd like to understand this...as well as a studio's decision to make such a misguided cartoon!