Animation Celebration Saturday - Quest for Camelot

Warner Bros, 1998
Voices of Jessalyn Gilsig, Cary Elwes, Gary Oldman, and Jane Seymour
Directed by Frederik Du Chau
Music by Carole Bayer Sager; Lyrics by David Foster

By the late 90's, Disney was king of animation. Their movies were major hits, the songs that came from them won awards and sold soundtrack albums into the millions, and they were even being successfully adapted for Broadway. After their success with the live-action/animated hybrid Looney Tunes film Space Jam, Warners threw their hat into the Disney musical ring with this medieval fantasy. Let's head to just outside of Camelot to see if it soars like the hawk seen throughout the film, or if it should be sent into exile...

The Story: Kailey (Gilsig) is proud that her father Sir Lionel (Gabriel Byrne) was once a Knight of the Round Table who gave his life for King Arthur's (Pierce Brosonan). Arthur was about to be killed by the power-mad Sir Ruber (Gary Oldman), but he sent Ruber into exile instead. All of Camelot is devastated when a griffin (Bronson Pinchot) attacks and steals the sword Excalibur. Merlin (Sir John Gielgud) sends his own hawk Ayden (Frank Welker) to retrieve it. Ayden does get it away, but it's lost in the Forbidden Forest. Ruber attacks Kailey and her mother, hoping to use them to get into Camelot, but the young woman is able to flee to the Forbidden Forest. Blind hermit Garrett (Elwes) lives in the forest, as do the two-headed dragon Devon (Eric Idle) and Cornwall (Don Rickles), who want nothing more than to be split apart. Kailey convinces them to help her find Excalibur and restore Camelot to its former glory...if they can avoid Ruber and his army of metal warriors, including the axe-chicken Buckbeak (Jaleel White).

The Animation: Along with the music, the colorful animation is the standout here. They did some really nice work here for the time, especially in the lush backgrounds at the Forbidden Forest and Camelot and the effects animation in some of the songs. The colors, especially in the Forest, are glorious, glowing with jewel-like greens, purples, dark reds, and deep blues. Wish the few attempts at CGI had dated as well. The rock ogre looks especially obvious nowadays.

The Song and Dance: Some decent performances liven up this odd fantasy. Elwes is both touching and bitter as the youth who thinks his disability has lost him the chance at knighthood, while Gilsig isn't bad as the determined Kailey. The mostly mismatched Idle and Rickles do have a few funny moments as one of the more unusual dragons in movie history, and Seymour is lovely in her few scenes as Kailey's loving mother.

Favorite Number: "United We Stand" kicks off the film in stirring fashion as the Knights of the Round Table announce their loyalty to their king and one another. "I Stand Alone" introduces Garrett with a strong "I Am" song, similar to "United We Stand," has Garrett equally explain why he prefers his own company. Idle and Rickles' sniping at each other in "If I Didn't Have You" is mildly amusing.

What I Don't Like: This is another 90's animated musical that took several wrong turns on its way to the big screen. It started out as a more serious non-musical animated adventure based after the book The King's Damosel...but then Warners executives butted in and started making changes, hoping to come up with a blockbuster on a par with Disney's hits of the time. What they came up with was a cliched mess. The story makes no sense and isn't anything you haven't seen seen in dozens of other medieval action tales. Kailey, for all her spunk, comes off as bland, and the barely-registering King Arthur and his knights are worse. Gary Oldman's over-the-top Ruber seems to have come from another movie entirely, in design and performance. Jaleel White's useless Buckbeak is just annoying (him doing his voice in Urkel mode doesn't help).

The movie doesn't really know what it wants to be. Gilsig and Elwes are playing Beauty and the Beast, Devon and Cornwall fall somewhere between Timon and Pumbaa and the gargoyles from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Gary Oldman thinks he's in Air Force One. While the music includes the top-10 hit "Looking Through Your Eyes" and the Oscar-nominated "The Prayer," both songs are undercut by poorly placed and directed numbers. "The Prayer" is totally inappropriate for Kailey's escaping Ruber at her mother's farm, and ill-timed gags and effects make a hash out of "Through Your Eyes."

The Big Finale: I actually went to see this when it was released in May 1998...and walked out of the theater greatly disappointed. It was one of the few films I saw in the late 90's and early 2000's in the theater that I flat-out didn't like. My opinion remains largely the same today. The movie does have its fans, mainly young women who grew up in the late 90's and admired Kailey and the music, but I'm afraid I'm not one of them. For adventure-loving girls who are young enough to overlook the script problems or major fans of the cast or animation of this time only. Everyone else is better off looking up the soundtrack and skipping the rest.

Home Media: Not on Blu-Ray at press time, but can pretty easily be found on DVD solo or as part of at least two collections, as well as on several streaming companies.

DVD
DVD - 4 Film Favorites: Family Movie Night
Amazon Prime