"Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss" - Zach's Take

Okay, so I know we haven't updated consistently or frequently, and I also know that we didn't post a "coming soon" for this flick. We apologize. Chalk it up to the stresses of employed life; sometimes, at the end of the day, you just don't feel like watching or writing about crappy movies. Sometimes you feel like watching good stuff. I know, I know, first world problems. Here's my ultimate point, people: don't get a job. Stay at home all day so you can watching streaming movies on Netflix and post your blather on the internet. The bills will pay themselves. Food isn't important. Exercise is overrated.

Speaking of bad advice, who told the director of Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss to go out and make this film?

I'm slightly torn on this review. Not because this isn't a bad film -- it most certainly is -- there's just an aspect of it that I kind of respect, which is that director Phil Nibbelink animated the entire film in himself over the period of four years (!). The down side, of course, is that it shows.

I mean, certainly the animation is mostly fluid, but the character designs and backgrounds are the most generic, Disney-style junk, which is not surprising considering Nibbelink is a former Disney animator. Sometimes the seals barely resemble seals, including the antagonist, who just looks like the gob of snot with the awful New York accent from those Mucinex commercials.

Quite honestly, this movie is bad in the same way many animated (and non-animated, I suppose) Disney films are.* It feels manipulative and cynical, in a we-must-fill-all-four-quadrants, coldly calculated manner. A marketing person's wet dream. There's the intolerable, "comic relief" character who's about as funny as leukemia, a pudgy, dopey sidekick character, and of course, the aforementioned mucus blob "villain." The Disney-fication even comes down to the character designs, as Romeo and Juliet each have the big, doe eyes intended to immediately elicit sympathy. Blech.

I'd like to believe that at one time Mr. Nibbelink had a modicum of originality and creativity, and that purely by virtue of working at Disney for so long his soul was stripped out of him.

I mean, this guy took four years of his life and had the opportunity to make whatever kind of movie he wanted. He could have made a mature, intriguing film, unfettered by a behemoth corporation that was only trying to turn it around and make some cash. He didn't have to answer to anyone. No dealing with upper management calling the shots and interfering with the creative process. No marketing idiots to deal with. He could have made something unique. Instead, he made one of the most insipid, shallow, and trite animated films of all time.

Don't even get me started on why the whole Romeo and Juliet aspect of the film is wholly unnecessary. Don't we already have enough terrible Shakespeare adaptations and "interpretations?"

Stupid, unnecessary, and an incredible waste of talent, Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss is one of the worst films we've subjected ourselves to for this site. That's something to be proud of, I guess.

*There are many Disney films that I enjoy. However, most are terrible, nostalgia aside.