I guess it isn’t illegal to make bad animated versions of stories that are in the public domain.
Wasted two spots in my Netflix queue for these ripoffs.
I take it you’ve never looked through the DVDs at the dollar store? Generic animated kiddie movies in the style of Disney are nothing new. At least the ones you linked to have some actual recognizable names involved (Christopher Lee, Derek Jacobi) (unless they found some other guys with those same names).
They’re hoping to trick people who don’t read carefully enough - or those whose kids will spot one of those and then beg and beg for another version of a movie they already love.
-Joe
They’re not the only ones. A series called “Enchanted Tales” had knockoffs of nearly every Disney animated feature from The Jungle King on through the end of the 90’s at least. Hunchback, Pocahontas, Hercules, Tarzan, “The Legend of Su-Ling”
It’s to confuse/trick grandparents into buying it for the little ones.
Jason Connery’s dad was involved in another Aladdin movie, The Thief and the Cobbler, brilliant in its own right but lesser-known. Some of these “knockoffs” are pretty worthwhile. Most, though, are not.
Heh, I came in here all prepared to rant about Disney knocking off other movies. Guess I’ll just take my Kimba the White Lion somewhere else then. harumph
[quote]
Jason Connery’s dad was involved in another Aladdin movie, The Thief and the Cobbler, brilliant in its own right but lesser-known. [/quote
That’s not an Aladdin movie, and not a knock-off. It was a labor of love by Richard Williams, the guy responsible for the animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and who’d been working on it for over twenty years. Its appearance at the same time as Disney’s Aladdin was mere luck.
It got made, but still only as a bare shadow of what it should have been. Read and weep:
Cecil’s column on the matter. The Lion King is not a rip-off of Kimba, it’s a rip-off of Hamlet.
A YouTube fan-made trailer for The Thief and the Cobbler. Phenomenal animation:
It’s also kinda a rip of off Kimba. Personally I have never seen the similarity to Hamlet except in the most generic way possible. But the character models and names etc…very kimba.
Aladdin is also a direct knock of of one of the Sinbad movies (7th voyage? I’m not sure.) Down to the evil Vasir dressed in red and black and the short pudgy sultan dressed in white and the princess Jasmine dressed in blue.
I saw it on AMC when I was 14 or 15 and my jaw dropped.
Ultimately, I am not sure that it really matters.
And Derek Jacobi rocks, maybe those knock off’s don’t totally suck. (Unlikely, but you never know)