SummaryIn the adorably different town of Uglyville, weird is celebrated, strange is special and beauty is embraced as more than simply meets the eye. Here, the free-spirited Moxy (Kelly Clarkson) and her UglyDoll friends live every day in a whirlwind of bliss, letting their freak flags fly in a celebration of life and its endless possibilities....
SummaryIn the adorably different town of Uglyville, weird is celebrated, strange is special and beauty is embraced as more than simply meets the eye. Here, the free-spirited Moxy (Kelly Clarkson) and her UglyDoll friends live every day in a whirlwind of bliss, letting their freak flags fly in a celebration of life and its endless possibilities....
UglyDolls is “Trolls Lite,” and the way things work I have no doubt we’ll be seeing a movie in the next few years that’s “UglyDolls Lite.” Yet this is still a winsomely appealing and joke-happy bauble for kiddies.
Ultimately, it’s a standard formula for a kid’s movie (and standard formulas are standard for movies that are also toy ads). UglyDolls isn’t particularly inventive or outstanding.
I'm not kidding, I honestly like Uglydolls. It has some small issues with its writing, the message does feel slightly hammered in, and it does feel a bit too Disney Channel-ish for something called "Uglydolls". But it does offer catchy songs, lovable characters, beautiful animation, a simplistic yet fitting story for the property, chuckle-worthy humor, some strong emotional moments, and a well-executed theme about your body image. It's a very fun movie with a big heart, and I feel like families can get a kick out of this one. Yea, it's corny, but it's the charming kind of corny. Hell, the film is aware of how stupid it is.
If you think this movie is Boring, Forgettable, and Annoying, then ok, I respect your opinion. But please for the Love Of God don't use arguments like:
-It's a Trolls Ripoff (Just because it has colorful characters and pop songs, doesn't make it a ripoff of Trolls. Both are almost entirely different movies.)
-They're not ugly, they're cute (They've always been cute. You can argue they made them a bit too cute, but they've never really changed that much so...)
-It copies other animated films (Don't all animated films copy each other? It's nothing new.)
-It shows how all Animated Films are terrible now (Not every single film has to have something deep you know. Just let a simple movie be a simple movie. If you're gonna compare this to something like Spider-Verse, then you shouldn't be called a critic. People just bash this movie because it's an easy target, just like Barney's Great Adventure, and it's very tiring. If you're going to critique a silly kids movie, go ahead, but please don't go deep into what it does wrong, because it just seems so childish. This film doesn't represent how animated films are terrible nowadays, it represents how much critics can't find good criticisms for animated movies anymore.)
What I'm saying is that, if you dislike it, fine. But please don't be so hard on it.
Thank You.
So there’s every reason to expect this to suck, completely and utterly. But the tunes become a sort of saving grace, the animation’s not bad and the there’s enough slapstick to keep tiny tykes distracted.
For anyone over 5, it’s best as mild, inoffensive background noise, but no more thrilling or satisfying than that. It turns out to be nothing more than a merchandising opportunity after all.
UglyDolls is a mind-numbing, low-rent version of “Toy Story,” with saccharine songs and a plot with echoes of, no kidding, the Holocaust. If you’re under 10, you might like it.
Nearly eight years on from the signing of all the brand extension contracts, here is the primarily pop-star-voiced animated musical UglyDolls, an imbecilic eyesore that could lay claim to being one of the worst movies ever made if it was worth such hyperbole.
I would say that this movie is for very young children and fans of Kelly Clarkson, Janelle Monae, or Nick Jonas, with apparently has no appeal beyond that. My expectations for this movie were not high. Despite its limits, Ugly Dolls is an oasis in a vast media desert dried of optimism. A welcome break from a draining milieu, this film celebrates hope, non-conformity, and perseverance,
and yet despite touting non-conformity, conforms as a film to the very cookie-cutter type mold it critiques, which is quite a fatal flaw.
Wow, I'm really surprised Uglydolls got a 39 out of 100 on the Metascore. Well, time to review this.
First, the voice actors, there are a lot of good ones. Such as Kelly Clarkson, Blake Shelton, Nick Jonas, Wanda Sykes. I feel like Uglydolls is like a combination between Toy Story and Trolls, (yeah, I know, weird combination, fight me) but the movie was stupidly average! The plot is both cliche and really predictable but, the singing! I would've given Uglydolls a score between 3 to 6 if it weren't for the singing. The singing is pretty phenomenal and has a lot of great original songs but around 1 or 2 songs, (or more) kinda **** and quite cringy but that is my opinion. You can't be mad at how great the singing is.
Despite how lots of people either disliked Uglydolls or hated it, the movie was enjoyably average in my perspective. Uglydolls is a movie that kids might/will enjoy, and how teens and adults judge the film is their own perspective and judgment. So, I give Uglydolls a score of 5.
UglyDolls is cute and sweet with lovely rainbow colours, cheerful voice acting, and lots of fun songs. Remember people, it's aimed at kindergarteners, so it's not supposed to be really deep and groundbreaking, and it isn't. It's very simplistic storytelling with tame jokes. But for its target audience of little tykes who want to see cuddly toys having an adventure, it's fine enough, and teaches a nice lesson for them.
From that one line of toys that was popular in the early 2000s comes the big-screen debut of UglyDolls over 10 years too late! I really didn’t want to see this movie. I’ve seen the trailer way too many times both in front of YouTube videos and movies at the dollar cinema and it just looked bad. However, it showed up on one of the library’s free streaming services recently so I thought I may as well give it a watch and boost the number of 2019 films I’ve seen. Now usually with these reviews I like to let the film sit for a day or two before sitting down and writing a review. However, if I do that with this movie I think I might actually forget everything about it. It’s that kind of movie. Imagine, if you will, a movie that’s basically a mix of Toy Story, The LEGO Movie, Trolls and Shrek. Now think about how that movie would go. You got it? Now add in a bunch of generic-sounding pop songs and bad jokes. There. You’ve seen UglyDolls. It does absolutely nothing new, which on its own I don’t think is a bad thing. I love Star Wars, Avatar and Stranger Things and all of those do absolutely nothing new. I have no idea why I brought that up because this movie is not enjoyable or entertaining despite the story being done before. It’s just so painfully generic and cookie-cutter, which is ironic because the movie is all about being unique. Actually, let’s talk about the moral for a minute. While it isn’t a bad moral, it is waaaaaayyyyyyyyy too heavy-handed, preachy and unsubtle! Like I said before, Shrek pretty much had the exact same moral and did it a million times better, and that was just under 2 decades ago! Also, holy crap Shrek is as old as I am. Anyway, back to the review! The animation, while colourful, just didn’t look quite right to me. Something about the way the characters moved and how they were textured just looked a little off. It’s no Pixar, but it’s above TV-quality animation which I guess is the bare minimum for something like this. Speaking of the characters, they are also very generic. Half of the main characters aren’t even set up or established at all, they just kind of show up! The voice acting also left a lot to be desired. This movie has a cast of celebrities, mostly music artists, and I mostly just saw them in the recording booth and not as their characters. None of the comedy worked for me either. Also, my favourite comedian Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias played one of the main characters and I didn’t even notice until the very end! He barely has any lines! He certainly never says anything funny! I have no idea why nobody hires him to do more major roles in animated projects. His whole schtick is telling stories with funny voices, he’s perfect for animation but for some reason nobody uses him correctly. Anyway, this movie was also a musical. It has original songs but, much like The Greatest Showman, they sound so poppy that it may as well be a jukebox musical. While the songs are catchy and performed well, you don’t hire so many artists for an animated movie and don’t have them sing, they are also very forgettable, the lyrics aren’t great and they are all, once again, generic. That’s this movie summed up in one word: generic. Also, one last thing I need to mention is that I really don’t understand how the universe of the film works. It isn’t like in Toy Story where they’re just toys that come to life in the real world. It’s more like The LEGO Movie where it takes place in a parallel toy dimension except it makes a lot less sense. It’s hard to explain but you’d see what I mean if you saw the film, which I really don’t recommend you do. If you need Uncle TV to babysit your kids for an hour and a half, this is fine to throw on (There’s nothing scary and there aren’t any dirty jokes are anything. It’s clearly meant for younger kids.) but something good and more original would also be fine to throw on. Just don’t bother with this movie. You will gain nothing from watching it. Just watch Toy Story or The LEGO Movie or Shrek instead. One last thing. Robert Rodriguez both produced and wrote the story for this movie. I just thought that was interesting. That is all I have to say. UglyDolls leaves me with nothing, which just might be the worst thing a movie can leave you with.
Very poor. Did not enjoy. This movie almost feels like there was no effort put into it whatsoever. They did know their audience was young children, and so they made it difficult to understand for mature people like me.