Ricardo Lopez

I'll believe in the chupacabra or a blurry black and white photo of the loch ness monster before I believe any of these AI generated 5-star reviews. By practically every meaningful metric this movie is garbage. Spoilers btw. The main issue is the villain. Magnifico's motivations are harder to understand than my grandmother's early morning text messages. "But wait," you say, "this is a tribute to the classic Disney villains who are just bad and there's no explanation as to why." Wrong, b/c this villain starts out as a trusted leader of the community that everybody admires, and has actually turned the kingdom into a prosperous place. But then all of a sudden he starts acting evil as soon as soon as Asha questions him and a random star appears? And no explanation is given? That's just inconsistent. In the 100+ years of him ruling, Asha couldn't have possibly been the only person or apprentice to question him, which means there's been plenty of time for his wife to have picked up on his evil demeanor. But yet even she is completely taken aback when he randomly starts acting evil. No actual explanation is given as to why he's so obsessed with the star, or why he believes it to be so powerful, or why he believes granting everyone's wishes is such a dangerous thing. Also, he's defeated by everyone in the city singing in unison. HUH? Singing is not set up or shown to possess magic qualities, only wishes. Yet somehow it beat him? That aside, pacing is weird. Music is mediocre at best. Everyone praises the animation but I think it's forgettable. World building is soulless...the star thing is literally just a luma from Mario Galaxy/movie lol. I'm just so confused by what people are saying here

The animation is pretty nifty and stuff but the movie is definitely overrated and is wasted potential imo. A lot of the major plot points in the story, like Hispanic family working thru dysfunction, trauma from the past, grandma at the center of everything, have not only already been done in movies like CoCo (in a much more well thought out way if I may add), but they were delivered in this movie with striking uneventfulness and thru less charming and intriguing characters. At least in CoCo the protagonist actually goes thru some type of journey and the character development is overall pretty satisfying. But yeah my wife and I were both genuinely left wanting for more when the movie ended. The mechanics and background of how the magic works is pretty interesting but everything else is meh. Something about Disney's pandemic-era movies is just off (Luca is pretty great though). They're doing the best they can I guess...