Actually, I've seen both of them. I am assuming and hoping there isn't a third.
Anyway, part of the reason why these kinds of expeditions are interesting to me is the consideration of the creators motivations; or, more simply, why do people make this shit? Ed Wood's movies are interesting in large part because they were personal, introspective projects; it's all the pure emotion and personal investment that's behind an average Scorsese picture, except it's combined with hilarious ineptitude at the actual production side. They may be comically bad, but it's hard to sincerely hate these kind of movies.
Something like The Room is comparable, but the comedy in that comes from the pure absurdity of the whole thing. To paraphrase a random review, The Room has dialogue that implies the writer has never had contact with the human race; football is somehow catch; people make nonsensical entrances at inappropriate times, and leave within 3 minutes. All with a grim seriousness.
The types of movies that are the easiest to hate are cynical, lifeless cash-ins. This can apply to something like Men in Black 2, where any of the charm of the original is focus grouped away in favor of lifeless marketability and box office projections. But some low budget features are the same way, empty profit-motivated calculations designed to get some mild profit out of a piece of shit.
Which brings me to Video Brinquedo. Founded in Brazil in 1994 as an apparently straightforward children's animation company, something must have gone horribly, horribly wrong, because it has essentially become a criminal enterprise built on a scam. Their goal is to trick unsuspecting consumers into purchasing Video Brinquedo movies while looking for quality entertainment. This isn't a joke and is meant to be taken literally; they create cheap carbon copies of popular animated features (namely Pixar and Dreamworks), maintaining the key characteristics but removing any semblance of charm, wit and quality. They then give them similar sounding names and innocuous DVD covers to fool people into buying them instead of the movie they really want.
On some level, yeah, anyone who truly wants to the excellent Ratatouille should probably be able to tell this is a cheap, worthless ripoff. But let's not blame the victims here. Disinterested parents looking for a night's entertainment? Old people who vaguely know to get some movie about a rat making food? An uncle who figures "he liked that one movie about rats, he'll probably like another"? Really dumb people? To Video Brinquedo, it's less "target audience" and more "targets". It's not as if there's signed affidavits which indicate that this is indeed the pure intent of Video Brinquedo, but even without seeing a moment of their work it's hard not to reach that exact conclusion. Other titles include Little Bee, The Tiny Little Cars, and Tangled Up!
On a creative level, this is where things get interesting: you can't ONLY sell the DVD box, there does need to be something at least vaguely resembling an actual children's motion picture inside. So the entire motivation of the process here is purely the most cynical kind of profit and it's unlikely anyone on the creative team is interested in making anything of any value. Yet something, anything, still needs to be made, basically as an afterthought of the whole process. The result, unsurprisingly, is godawful garbage: horrific quality CG, a script that was either completely improvised or written in 30 minutes, obvious filler shots (filler meaning they needed extra stuff to full up the runtime, which is under an hour), just everything that could go wrong in an animated movie is going to go wrong. Oddly enough, the voice actors (at least in the English dub) are somewhat respectable, but they're given nothing to work with; they try their best, but we can write these off as paychecks.
I have viewed two movies from this company that happened to be airing in an online stream: Ratatoing and The Little Panda Fighter. If you're insane as well, both movies are available on Youtube; no copyright protections has been invoked presumably because, as mentioned, the actual viewing of the movie is not important to the motivations of Video Brinqueno.
Ratatoing is about as bad as you could expect, and worthwhile, though it trends towards the dull as opposed to the entertainingly bad. A mouse named Marcel Toing lives in The City (it's obvious Rio de Janeiro but for some reason they just call it "The City"), where he works at his restaurant and blahblahblah who gives a shit its ratatouille but horrible. The biggest gut laugh probably comes when, presumably for lack of an appropriate animated run cycle, a cat who is chasing the main character runs like a gorilla. The few seconds of dialogue there should give you a feel for the whole thing.
Despite just sticking around for it, The Little Panda Fighter proved a much more interesting experience. There is no more semblance of legitimate artistic effort in here than in Ratatoing; still an obvious ripoff, the animation is just as dismal and the script just as lacking. Which is why it's all the more surprising they stumbled onto something awesome. Without subjecting yourself to the movie, it is necessary to go through the machinations of the plot.
The Little Panda Fighter is, at least ostensibly, about a panda bear named Pancada, a low level bar janitor who dreams of becoming a dancer. He works for Polaris, a polar bear who runs a club which also functions as a boxing site. He is business partners with a bear named Grizzlepuss, a gambler who consistently has snot coming out of his nose for some reason. Pancada has a thing for coworker Beth, who doesn't like him at all and actively mocks him within the first 10 minutes of the movie. The movie really hates this Pancada guy.
The plot follows Pancada as he tries to become a better dancer in order to impress Beth, with the help of a "Chinese master" type character called Master Jin. It's pretty dumb shit. But there's also a subplot which eventually merges into the main plot concerning the bar owner, Polaris. The champion, Freaky Teddy Thunders (get it teddy bear bahahahahaaha no) has been dominant at the top of the card for far too long, and the customers are getting bored as a result. Polaris used to be a champion boxer himself, but because of an agreement with Grizzlepuss that could only exist for plot purposes, he's not allowed to go back into the ring.
Most of the movie's intended humor comes from hideously unfunny montages where Pancada either dances or trains for his upcoming fight, as well as standard issue "HE IS AWKWARD AROUND WOMEN" jokes between him and Beth. There's also references of various popular bear characters; among them, Grizzlepuss is an obvious Yogi Bear ripoff and one of the first victims of Freaky Teddy is a Care Bear equivalent. The line between ripoff and reference is hard to spot, and the humor of "fighting Care Bear" is on-par with zero effort Robot Chicken shit anyway. The thing that will actually make you laugh namely come from the godawful animation. Watch this scene and note of how long it takes Pancada to reach the desk; this happens like 5 separate times. Some hardcore filler going on up in here.
Polaris finds a loophole to the agreement with Grizzlepuss: if he's wearing a mask as a "mystery opponent", then he technically wouldn't be getting back into the ring, and could defeat Freaky Teddy himself. He only tells Pancada of his plans, and sends him to wash and dry his costume; along the way, he runs into Beth and Grizzlepuss, who are skeptical of the new challenger. Pancada defends the mystery opponent, saying he could have a chance. Pancada finds a way to fuck up dry cleaning, so the costume ends up shrinking on Polaris. The combination of the shrunken black costume and the white fur of a polar bear ends up making the disguised Polaris look like a panda. Despite the gigantic differences in height and rotundity (Polaris's character design is obviously based on a realistic version of a polar bear, while Pancada is a cartoony version of a panda, making the whole thing even more ridiculous), and based on the earlier conversation, Grizzlepuss and Beth come to the conclusion that the mystery opponent must in fact be Pancada! Disguised Polaris, of course, kicks Freaky Teddy's ass, and the masked man wins the championship. There's like 50 holes of logic here, I know, and it's all so fucking stupid, but just stay with me for a bit.
While this is going on, Pancada is trying to finish his training and get accepted into a high-level dancing society, or something; it should be no surprise that he fails at this. This enables the movie to jump between horribly animated fight sequences and horribly animated dance sequences. Because of miscommunications the next day, Pancada misinterprets the high praise from Grizzlepuss and Beth on what they thought was his fight as actually being comments on his dancing, and in the process unintentionally confirms their suspicions. This becomes doubled when Beth, now seeing Pancada as a champion, has gone from actively mocking him to having a romantic interest. Video Brinquedo isn't exactly a feminist studio.
Everything becomes clear when Pancada and Polaris have a talk. When Pancada reveals he thinks people are complimenting him on his dancing, Polaris reacts with laughter that is so bizarre and animated so poorly that it needs to be seen to be believed. Freaky Teddy wants an immediate rematch; Polaris decides he will have to keep the costume and beat him again. In order to impress Beth, after a talk with Master Jin, Pancada decides he wants to fight the fight himself; he even threatens to go to the papers about Polaris's deceit if he isn't allowed to fight. Polaris begrudgingly agrees, and they proceed to have one of the most horrible training montages of all time in preparation; the fight becomes a hugely hyped event, and Pancada's perceived win over Freaky Teddy has enabled him to be the favorite. By the end of his training, Grizzlepuss has put down money on a Pancada victory, and even Polaris seems to believe he can do it. Pancada himself is nervous, but Master Jin tells him that if he fights like he dances, he'll surely win.
Pancada gets into the ring. The dialogue tells us the bar is absolutely packed, despite the fact it is clearly empty. Guess they didn't want to animate customers. The first round somehow happens without any punches being thrown. Round 2 involves Pancada being punched (sort of) with no offense. Then he remembers his master's words. Round 3 begins with Pancada going into dancing mode, eye gouging his opponent (this is our hero, remember) and attempting a kick...which doesn't work at all. Teddy proceeds to offer a knockout punch to the face. Pancada is shown daydreaming, falling through the sky in his dancing gear, while the audience awaits the inevitability of him getting back up.
He does not.
Pancada just got his ass kicked and it wasn't even close. Defeated physically and mentally, Pancada goes into Polaris's office the next day (horrible walkcycle and all) to apologize for screwing everything up. Here's where it gets awesome.
After hearing a sincere apology, Polaris reveals that he never believed Pancada could do it at all. His exact words are "Remember when you training and I kept saying, 'I know you could beat that overgrown furball? Well I was lying! I knew there was no way a tubby little panda could beat a fighter like that!" But Pancada doesn't need to worry, according to Polaris. Everyone else so was convinced that Pancada was going to win, while only Polaris knew the real story that he didn't have a chance. Having absolutely zero faith in his friend, Polaris put all of his money on Teddy to win before the fight, and is now "the richest man in the whole city!" Pancada admits even he put money on himself to win.
While this is all happening, Grizzlepuss has figured out the mystery of the obvious body shape differences and fighting styles of Pancada's 'first' and second match, and has put everything together. He goes to the back to confront Polaris over breaking the terms of their agreement, only to find...Pancada sitting in his chair. After convincing him he's not Polaris in disguise (even though Grizzlepuss just figured this stupid shit out, he apparently falls for it again), Pancada reveals that Polaris has skipped town with all of his gambling money. The last shot we see of him is in a tundra area, complete with "deal with it" sunglasses. They have a small conversation which sums up the plot for anyone who missed anything, and presumably to fill time. As a final move, Polaris has signed over the bar to Pancada, who turns it into a restaurant and ballroom. Beth tells Pancada "everything is going to be fine", and he goes on stage to dance, much to Grizzlepuss's anger.
Let's just review what happened here:
- Polaris broke the rules of his contract and kicked Teddy's ass
- When threatened by Pancada with revealing the whole affair, he allows his presumable friend to go through with a dangerous fight that he knows he can't win
- While this is going on, he uses his insider knowledge to basically swindle everyone in town out of their money
- Before anyone can call him on it, he skips town with everyone's money
- Grizzlepuss, who has presumably done nothing wrong beyond being animated annoyingly, is completely screwed out of his contract and money
- Our "hero" has failed at dancing, failed at fighting, and there's very little in the way of indications that he's legitimately won over the heart of the girl. His biggest success was being a pawn in Polaris's master plan
...what the fuck? This would be a bizarre ending for a children's cartoon no matter how you sliced it, but it at least would make some sense if it could be connected to a legitimate creative instinct; for an easy example, Invader Zim did crazy shit all the time in a children's show, which could be connected to its eccentric creator Jhonen Vasquez or the creative team that shared his vision. The fact that a movie that was apparently created with no creative vision, no effort, as a purely cynical cash-in calculation, could come up with such a bizarre and maybe even subversive ending absolutely boggles the mind.
The exact motivations of Video Brinquedo will never be known; the exact writing process of The Little Panda Fighter isn't going to be revealed in any DVD special feature. At the end of the day, we can only guess at how a cold, calculating bad=assed sociopath like Polaris could come out of a movie like this.
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