The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		2.0

The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale Blu-ray Movie Review

As Tchaikovsky rolls over in his grave...

Reviewed by Martin Liebman February 22, 2014

There must be some magical formula, locked away deep within the bowels of Hollywood vaults, that precisely calculates the highest anticipated revenue from the lowest possible filmmaking cost. For some movies, billions of dollars appear on one side of the equation with hundreds of millions on the other. More frequently, it's more "manageable" figures on either side, and then there are bottom feeders, the movies that cost relatively little produce and hope to gain a bit more than that figure back in sales. The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale may be the perfect example of an ultra-small budget direct-to-video animated film hoping to capture a particular market with bright colors, a prince and princess in peril, an evil force in pursuit, and animation that barely stacks up with lower-end Saturday morning programs and decent video games. It's a classic "cost-benefit" demonstration: low cost, slightly higher potential benefit, a wing and a prayer that daughters will beg their parents to pick it up off the new release end cap at Target. The movie is rather paltry, trite, bland, and most every other negative adjective in the book, but for filmmakers, the good news is that the target audience may not care so long as it's new but familiar, which The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale delivers in every frame.

I spend 1 second on my hair.

A powerful entity called "Forbidden Arts" searches the Earth for any who poses a challenge to his power. One day, he learns of a prophesy that foretells the arrival of the "Swan Princess," a person who will bring goodness and harmony to the world, which of course means an end to his reign of terror. Forbidden Arts alters the prophecy to instead declare pending doom upon the world with the Swan Princess' arrival. When animals known as "Scullions" discover the prophecy, they make it their life's work to ensure that the Swan Princess' reign is short and uneventful. Centuries pass, with Forbidden Arts biding his time and gaining strength while the Scullions build up their power and courage to battle the coming of the evil princess. When the Swan Princess and her husband, Prince Derek, ascend to power in the kingdom, they rule benevolently and show no ill-will to the world around them. That doesn't prevent the Scullions from making attempts on the Princess' life. When one of Forbidden Arts' own attacks doesn't go as planned, a young girl named Alise is orphaned and taken in by the royal family. Perhaps she will be the leverage Forbidden Arts requires to ensure he beats the prophecy and remains in power forever.

The original The Swan Princess was lovingly animated in a hand-drawn style reminiscent of the many Disney classics of yore. The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale looks like it was cranked out as a weekend CGI project. The animation is borderline awful. It looks bad, flows terribly, and shows little detail. It's a surprise given a name franchise and a big studio backing but not really a surprise given the aforementioned cost-benefit analysis of pushing a 20-year-old movie into a new generation of quick and dirty CGI and DTV markets. Recently, a lot was made -- including more than a few jokes -- of the "HD Fur" in Nintendo's newly released (and excellent, by the way) Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze Wii U video game. The fur looks marvelous, full of life and movement on the individual level in cut scenes and nicely rendered in-game, too. And it looks worlds better than hair and fur in The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale. It's painful to admit that a movie with this pedigree and backing can't look better than a video game on an "underpowered" system. Sure, it's something of an apples-to-oranges (bananas?) comparison, but the point is that movie fans rightly expect something a little more polished from a film with name recognition, not a cut-rate animation style that looks like it was churned out of The Asylum factory of bad moviemaking.

What's even worse is that there's no substance beneath that terrible animation. The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale's story is trite at best and unforgivingly dull at worst, a slog through the worst Prince/Princess Fairy Tale cliché around, along with the now-obligatory collection of pop songs that sell the "everything will be OK" message in times of distress. And the movie even fumbles its cliché. There's a shortage of rhythm, of interesting characters, of a real sense of peril, of even an honest effort at telling a story with a modicum of interest, qualities that even the most generic animated fare, like Khumba, at least strive to, and sometimes, achieve. Then again, one must really try to view the film from the target audience's perspective, but chances are even it will find the movie perhaps not so much laborious but certainly a far step down from superior titles, "filler," perhaps, something to occupy the mind after homework or on a cold, wintry shut-in Saturday afternoon.

The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

As discussed above, The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale is a wholly unattractive film, but at least Sony's Blu-ray transfer does all it can with the limited resources. It's a clean and well-defined image, showing the flat, low-detail animation nicely enough. It displays all the visible animated textures on stone, grasses, wood, and clothes with ease. Colors are suitably robust, though the palette is limited to, generally, broad shades rather than nuanced hues. It's the equivalent of working with the 8-crayon box rather than the 96 count box. A hint of aliasing is visible from time to time, but otherwise the image appears fairly stable and satisfying.

The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale features a loud and occasionally ear-taxing DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack. Though it's often uneventfully fine, providing well-defined, nicely spaced, and sufficiently deep and balanced music, dialogue, and sound effects, the track sometimes struggles with balance. Dialogue can get a bit screechy at the top. Various sound effects come across as shrilly. The track as a whole can seem a little much at reference volume, pushing through a lot of sound -- music, dialogue, effects -- that seem too loud when mixed together. During one of the pop songs in chapter five, lip synch movements seem to be way off, though it's unclear whether that's accidental or a result of lazy animation not really matching the music. Overall, the track does its job, but turn the volume down for the duration.

The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Aside form previews for other family-friendly Sony titles, The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale contains only two sing-alongs: We Wanna Hear From You (HD, 2:59) and Right Where I Belong (HD, 2:59). DVD and UV digital copies are included in the case.

The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale is really, really bad. Perhaps its target demographic will find some value, but adults looking for anything even remotely interesting or remotely close in style, tone, or quality of production to the original film will be sorely disappointed. It looks cheap, plays cheap, lacks interesting characters, and fails to tell much of an original story. This is low-end modern digital animation near the bottom of the barrel. Sony's Blu-ray release of The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale features adequate video and audio. Supplements are limited to two sing alongs. Skip it, and hope the young ones don't notice it until it's dirt cheap.