a fun feature
There have been a fair number of monster movies for kids around in the last 10 years, and the keen critic team of Ms6, Mr10 & Ms13 were more than happy to take up the offer to see this. They love Monsters Inc, Shrek, Hotel Transylvania, Minions, and Ms6 somehow has a love for scary films – some of her favourites are the Goosebumps films and Disney’s Descendants films.
Princess Barbara is over the moon as it is her 16th birthday, so she can now have some freedom. Secretly, she reads comics, which her father the king hates, and is love with Prince Edward from the comic, and they have both been writing to each other.
Unfortunately for her, King Elijah refuses to believe she is anywhere near grown up and still wants her to dress and behave like a child. Princess Barbara refuses to comply, cutting her long dress and long hair short and creating a scene at her birthday party.
In the meantime, a corrupt and ambitious mail clerk named Bundy, voiced by Pauly Shore, finds a way to blackmail the king, and then gets the king to agree to him marrying the princess. Naturally, Princess Barbara is horrified and flees.
Princess Barbara (voiced by Haylie Duff) meets up with Boogey, the outlaw monster and his best friend, Bunny, who are unofficial protectors of the forest. She asks them to help her get to Prince Edward… but is Prince Edward what he seems? And what is Bundy planning as he creates bigger and scarier machines? Does Boogey the monster really want to be involved here? What will happen to the forest if Bundy gets his way?
The animation in My Sweet Monster is absolutely top-notch. The scenery, colours and animals are fabulous, and they almost have a steampunk quality to them. The eagle eye of Ms13 spotted though that this was dubbed from the original Russian, as if you look very closely, you can tell that the voices don’t match the way the mouths move. (I didn’t spot it and had to squint very closely to see this, then again, I didn’t have my glasses on!)
As per a few kids’ films around recently, this one has also crammed in a fair number of storylines which did mean we had to talk a bit through to work out what was going on. Mr10 thinks it could have been streamlined by leaving out the search for Prince Edward and the songs. It also had a very heavy hand with the old-school fairytale aspect, showing some very old-school attitudes to women as property – but that was only through my adult eyes, the kids simply saw it as an old-school fairytale story.
Note that this one may be too scary for those under 6, with some loud and scary monster scenes, in particular the robot creations, which is also why it is rated PG.
All in all, we thought that My Sweet Monster, while not at the standard of other monster films, is a bit of fun to see during the holidays.
Reviewed by the Kid Critics Team.
