Read the original on Letterbox'd
That certainly was a movie alright.
The medium of animation has a lot of potential and I think that in a way this movie shows off what happens when your creativity and ideas far outstrip your talent and budget.
At no point during this movie was I ever really entertained, but in the words of Benoit Blanc, this movie makes no damned sense. Compels me, though. It is a chaotic, ugly, and noisy mess. Explosions and flashing lights happen, half the voices of characters are not remotely lined up with who's talking, either in terms of lipsync or what the character looks like. Weehawk is a tiny little gremlin looking elf but Richard Romanus is not even remotely interested in doing an accent befitting a short little big headed cartoon wearing nothing but a onesie and a sword. Meanwhile Elinore and sounds appropriate to a cartoon and yet her character wears a slutty lingerie and her nips are always out. It's so weird. Who is this movie for? It's not like the director of Fritz the Cat and Coonskin was making a kids' movie about Nazi propaganda, but it *looks* like a children's movie, up until the blood and nipples and Nazi propaganda. This is also Mark Hamill's first film. He voices a baby faced fairy with his adult human voice and then is shot and dies with less than a minute of screentime.
The movie's themes and messaging are also really confusing. The people of magic have outlawed technology because it caused the end of the world several million years ago, but when he drops this bit of lore, Avatar has just created a jukebox. By transmuting living animals, though nobody cares. He also pulls out a gun at the end to anticlimactically shoot Blackwolf. Which it feels like he could have done when they first fought, but whatever. Wikipedia claims that this is to show that technology is morally ambiguous, but also the movie opens saying that the forces of technology and magic are at war, and there's no implication other than Avatar's casual use of a fucking gun that we're supposed to get the impression that technology is viewed as useable by good.
Of course, it takes technology to make houses and swords and armor, but that's just sort of overlooked. Not that anyone ever actually uses magic, save for Avatar and the king of fairies, and one bit where Elinore shoots a laser beam from her vagina and animates a statue.
It's a nonsense movie. Stuff just happens.
At the core, the idea of the evil wizard twelve million years in the future unearthing Nazi propaganda and using it to make his forces invincible because it encourages and strengthens them while frightening the forces of good and causing them to cower is a great metaphor. But also the movie looks like a mess, and the budget just isn't there, and neither is the writing. Maybe Bakshi should have spent more than two weeks on the original treatment.
All in all, I didn't like this movie one bit. At no point was I entertained. It was a mess. But it certainly was an interesting mess.
This movie is like if Phil Foglio was doing drugs, and I think it would have performed better if home movies existed in the era of drugs.