Deti protiv volshebnikov

I like to look for a worst pieces of media I could find because I consider it a learning experience and in this way, Deti protiv Volshebnikov gives A LOT to learn from.

I've seen some bad movies. I watched a couple of bad slashers, I've seen most disgusting uhfunniest parodies out there, I've seen the Room, canadian Things, Neil Breen movies, but what makes this experience different is combination of atrocious dogmatism and Russian exceptionalism and absolute inability to make something that looks bearable. Every frame here looks like children drawing. Proportions are horrible, faces are unnatural, backgrounds are decent, but charecters don't exist in the same space with them.

But beyond ugliest movie known to humanity lies even uglier story. Main charecters are brave freedom fighters who came to destroy... children school. Because Russia considers a school that helps orphans a bad external influence, which is obviously performatively evil and depicted as ugly. And ugly people are obviously bad, so it's okay to bomb an entire island of children. You see, Russian's enemies are self-evidently evil, and it means no action against them is unprovoked.

In recent years this movie becomes only more disgusting and absolutely despicable. Considering that in real life it's Russian army that actually makes Ukrainian children orphans and takes them away from their families to russian's orphanages and families to give them proper "traditions", this movie becomes sad reminder that fascistic propaganda in the world is nowhere near to be dead and it's gonna raise it's ugly head many times more all over the world.

Just a masterpiece. Intentionally made of worse animation and dialogue to appeal to zoomers and turn into a meme. No boring moments. Go read the book too.

The blatant propaganda of this film is only the tip of the iceberg. The characters look horrendous, and are just pasted on top of the backgrounds (the only decent part of this film) with no care to layering/blending. The writing contains no subtlety, and in case the on-the-nose dialogue spoken by the poorly-animated mouths of the characters that look worse than designs done in a student web-series do not convey it well enough for you, there are jarring cuts from the animated narrative to a live-action present day to pound the message into your skull with a cross. These live-action bits serve no other purpose. Not only do the lines not match the animated characters' mouths, but also not characters' in the live-action parts. The score is often inappropriate for the scenes it's used in, such as the intense metal track playing over some kids doing push-ups. There is one track that is played several times during the film that is a copy of John Williams's "The Invisibility Cloak/The Library Scene" from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. The list of atrocities committed by this film is ceaseless. If you are considering watching this for any reason, I simply urge you to ABJURE.

The most ridiculous, disgusting and worthless attempt to make ... what? Not only was the work so poorly and ugly so animated in 2016, also the plot balances on the verge of some kind of madness between marasmatic propaganda and religious madness. I feel sorry for those children that looked "this".

....that you can see for free on YouTube. I'm not going to go into the gory details, but the film looks amazingly cheap despite the budget (I don't want to call it embezzlement, but if it barks like a dog....), and it is literally a stealth propaganda film for the Russian nationalism promoted by the Putin government mixed with the Russian Orthodox Christianity that is part and parcel of that quasi-ideology. The design of the characters break every rule of children's animation: the kids do not have large eyes (in fact they are beady and you don't see pupils unless you are close up) and their bodies look like un-rendered first drafts of computer-animated figures. There are car insurance ads with better animation!

Very much this is a Russian right-wing response to the "Harry Potter" books and films and its got the same mentality as the 1980s American anti-"Dungeons & Dragons" and interlinked anti-rock music campaign, except those things were grassroots movements started by Christian fundamentalists and here we have a branch of the State-approved Russian Orthodox Church working with funds from the State film board to create a film about evil wizards in a Scottish boarding school/castle infecting the minds of Russian orphans with occultic powers being opposed by teen undercover commandos from the Suvorov military academy (!), but with loads of violence and stiff live action segments. Russia has done much better in animation even in the 2010s, so the crudity of this film should not be seen as the norm by people who have never seen a Soviet or Russian-animated film.