The Magic Tiger and the Low Budget I watched it a long time ago as a TV series. Refreshing the impressions...
If anyone has forgotten or did not know, Siegfried and Roy are popular in the Nineties illusionists from Las Vegas, known for performing with a white tigress. In fact, these facts are all that remains in the cartoon from the prototypes.
The magical land of Sarmoti is not so magical for some time: the Titan gods, angry at something, left it, taking all the good magic, and the evil was imprisoned in the cursed temple of Phrygia. There have been increasing rumors of returning magic, and King Midas is desperately looking for any grain of magic to consolidate and increase his power. He is especially interested in a tigress who allegedly knows how to change her appearance. However, Roy, her friend and protector, knows that she has lost this ability since the Titans took away her Pneuma, life energy, along with other magical powers. He searches for her and hides from the king, and along the way meets Siegfried, a wandering magician, and a princess who wants to stop her father playing with dangerous forces. But it turns out that the heroes, on the contrary, release from the temple of Phrygia the spirits of Envy, Pride and Greed imprisoned there, as well as the pneuma of the tigress.
Stylistically, Sarmoti's world is strikingly colorful. “I, Loki, will soon be the most powerful of the Titans, and when I return to England, Zeus himself will bow before me.” But it's not a reproach! On the contrary, for this, perhaps, it is worth showing interest in the cartoon: the eclectic-postmodern world is memorable and full of curious details. For example, Siegfried’s partner is Rumplestiltskin, a goblin (?), who claims to have been a real wizard before and almost learned to turn straw into gold when magic left the world. Fairies fly everywhere, it seems, replacing annoying moths here (and someone trains them for pickpocketing), giants playing dice can inadvertently knock down their cubes ... All of this creates a strange but curious atmosphere. And England, by the way, is a different world, where the Titans have gone.
The trouble is that in the main scenario, with all these findings, it's terrible. It seems that the producers of ORT guessed right, and Siegfried & Roy was supposed to be a series, but it did not grow together - at least this is the only way I can explain the incredibly fast and confused, but at the same time some uneven development of the plot: as if each episode was tried to fit into a five-minute passage ... Whether it is the result of a poor presentation or its objective property, the plot is also extremely little meaningful, although, again, there are promising ideas ... not implemented by a tenth. The brain from this nonsense, to be honest, hurts.
The same goes for the visual side. There are unique designs - a little surreal, diverse and at the same time with a whole style, doing a lot to make the fantasy world of Saromoti look original and memorable. Actually, this is exactly what I and Siegfried and Roy only remembered after the previous viewing of sixteen years ago - stunning images of demonic vices; in general, the figurative series of the cartoon is very characteristic, and I can not remember analogues (I mean, in the animation: the roots of this style clearly lie in the works of Bosch and his like) - faces, and more often parts of persons located in places that are not supposed to them, a chimerical mixture of heterogeneous features, deliberate asymmetry ... It's all really stylish. It's a terrible shame that there are no phanarts on this. At the same time, the style of drawing (not aesthetics and design) is typical of the cartoons released on video in the early nineties, and the quality of the animation is simply terrifying. In some places, it seems, for a second, two or three frames.
It’s just an unfounded guess, almost certainly wrong, but my impression of the film is this: the producers bought the script of the entire season of the animated series, which could not be put into production, called Glavfried and Roy and glued it into a full-length for a minimum budget. Whether it is true or not, this is an example of brilliant ideas buried in a pile...something less brilliant, let’s say.
The film can be a very interesting spectacle, but hardly able to give pleasure.