THE CITY THAT SHOULDN’T BE FOUND

The Last Prince of Atlantis seems to be an endurance test. It seems to dare its audience how long it is willing to wade through a Dantean river of excrement before it wants to pull itself out of the muck and leave. The Last Prince of Atlantis is a lesson in its own regard, a lesson on how not to make an animated feature, a lesson in what happens when one waits through something seemingly exciting that will ultimately offer only disappointment. Truly it was a spectacle to witness a film where everything was done absolutely incorrectly, but it is not a spectacle I would eager recommend others partake in. Quite the contrary, this little film is a spectacle on par with a destructive volcanic eruption or a massive hurricane; it is devastating and tragic to behold, but one can’t help but keep their eyes glued to it.

The Last Prince of Atlantis juggles way too many plot lines for its own good. The first features an Indiana Jones-type character dismissed as insane by his peers for seeking out artifacts of the lost city of Atlantis. As luck has it, he stumbles upon some sunken Atlantean ruins containing a water-breathing young man in suspended animation. Rather than stick with this fascinating plot, we are immediately thrown into a Spanish-American family drama about some woman being married off to a cruel but wealthy sailor eager to for her hand and ownership of the whole town. It is unclear why this man is so cruel other than the classical ‘evil-for-the-sake-of-it’ archetype one would find in a storybook villain. The rest of the film plays out like a reverse Little Mermaid with the Atlantean  falling for the sailor’s bride-to-be.

This is where the similarities to The Little Mermaid vanish.  What instead follows is as trite a love story as one can imagine, one with particularly offensive emphasis on degrading the woman involved as much as humanly possible. One particularly misogynistic scene involves the capture of our female lead and subsequent absence of her for 20 minutes to be used as live bait for the ‘sea-devilish’ Atlanean.

Blatant misogyny is only one in a series of offenses this film dishes out. Another such offense is the absolutely heinous dialogue. I don’t know whether it was an issue of poor translation from its native tongue to English or simply poor verbiage, but the writing in this film could easily have been surpassed by a dog on Celtx. Every single character dumps exposition on the audience to the point of nausea. Rarely is someone’s backstory ever visualized, and in the few occasions it is, the writer felt the need to continue dumping exposition as though we couldn’t understand what was clearly onscreen.

And then, there were the goddamned talking animals. As though this film wasn’t jumbled enough, there are talking animals thrown into the mix, namely, a fat turtle, peg-legged crow, and the villain’s pet rat. The odd thing about these animals was that the writer couldn’t decide whether or not normal humans could understand them  as sometimes they converse with their humans and sometimes they don’t. It seemed that in earlier drafts, the Atlantean was supposed to be the only one to understand them, as bits and pieces of that idea are scattered throughout. I went through this film wishing that nobody understood these animals as their voice actors were beyond grating. Worse still was the fact that the animals’ sole purposes were to reiterate exposition dumped on us by the human characters and to make the same ‘fat joke’ over, and over, and over again.

But sometimes there come movies one is willing to overlook glaring narrative flaws in order to appreciate visual style. This is not one of those movies. At first glance, one could be charmed into thinking that the jilted awkward animation was meant to mimic the style of stop-motion with computer assets. This charm quickly wears off when one witness just how damned ugly everything looks. This film’s visual style appears as the deleted scenes to a better animated movie would. Models are too under-detailed and plasticy to look like a finished product, save for anything golden. Yes, it would seem that the only effort put into the scenery went into the golden towers of ancient Atlantis.

This film is a visual clash of the concept artists, as several styles are incorporated through pout and none of them work well together in the slightest. Certain character models, like the some of the townsfolk and the talking animals appear as cartoony caricatures of real world creatures while others are styled as realistically as the animators could manage. The best way I can describe this visual clash is if someone painted Bugs Bunny into the Mona Lisa.

If you can help it, please stay away from this film, Stay far away from it. Stay so far away from it thqat you come out of my review having forgotten its title. Trust me, there’s a reason that I can find no information on its production. If you wanted a good animated feature on the mythical city of Atlantis, you’re gonna have to look elsewhere, because if it’s the Last Prince of Atlantis, it’s a tale of a city that should stay lost.

.5/10

·         Director: Barbe Vladen

·         Distributor: Cinema Libre International