You know, when I look back to certain movies, TV shows, games and other stuff that I had never seen or played in a long time, I could feel my nostalgia every time I popped in something that was worth my time in past and still does even now.

It was like a comfort from home while reminiscing your memories as a child upon looking back in time.

However, when it comes to the point of revisiting memories from the past, most of the time, it’s a 50/50 chance that it would hold up well after all those years or eventually, it could end up not aging so well because of its flaws after you got older.

For example, when there’s a yin if an old thing of the past gets improved over time after you had revisited a piece of nostalgia, there’s a yang that plays the exact opposite when it gets sour after your revisit, making it as a flawed piece of its time.

That is how what happened when I have seen an obscure animated film from 1998 that is once one of my favorite animated films from my childhood aside from the Don Bluth’s of the 80s and a couple of Disney movies.

The one that I’m talking about is WB’s failed attempt to pluck a cherry out from Disney’s pie, Quest for Camelot, a film that I have seen it a couple of times as a kid, only to find out the truth years later after rewatching it as an 18-year old.

The film has not aged well as to the other animated movies that have either a cult following or a critical and financial success when comparing it to the films that I had mentioned.

And for a good reason how this movie had faltered into the depths of time, which I will cover on that later, right now I have some other damages to investigate with such problems like:

#1. Its Formulaic Story

To summarize what the problem was can be summed up in an imaginary scenario, imagine at one point that you went grocery shopping to buy the food that you need in a list.

Now think that for a moment, if you have a list of the things you need right at that time, what if it’s like that instead of food that’s on the list;

How about you went shopping to grab every trope and cliché of a 90’s animated film that you need on that list just to make a cluster storm of a mess, this is how the film represents that.

Quest for Camelot has a lot of certain ideas that has done before in most 90s animated musicals at the time and decided to cram it in for an hour and a half film, how much?

Listen at this if you heard that before, a rebellious teenage girl was getting sick and tired of doing jobs at a poor peasant house even after ten years after her father’s death (Which I will cover that later) who dreams of going on an adventure across the world someday as a knight.

But all that would change the entire life of her when an evil threat would plan to take over the entire kingdom (Cue Street Fighter: The Movie reference) under his iron fist by stealing the Excalibur off from Arthur’s hands so he could lead an army.

However, his pet Griffin lost the sword in a forbidden forest when Merlin’s falcon swooped in to attack the creature to protect the sword off from it.

Now the kingdom’s hands held over to the heroine, her blind love interest, wisecracking two-headed dragons and a falcon to retrieve the sword back to Arthur from disaster in a quest for honor and identity.

“Wait a sec, Andrew,” you tried to ask, “How does this moral topic had covered before?”

Simple, dear readers, about anything from a 90s animated feature, especially when it comes to musicals that revolved around the theme related to honor or identity like The Lion King or Mulan (Whom the latter came out one month after Camelot).

The story in Quest for Camelot here is, what I had said earlier, a cluster storm of a mess, down to the point that it even showed its wrinkles as time progresses.

And don’t jump the gun right here just yet, there are even more flaws aside from this mess.

There is even at that point on the film’s ending where the main villain was almost close to killing the stereotypical girl and her love interest after he got distracted from finishing King Arthur once and for all.

At that very moment, the girl had decided to use a maneuver that she learned from the film’s said love interest earlier via a love song montage to dodge certain attacks even when in dire situations.

Eventually, it leads to its last ditch effort to pull a happy ending after the film has run out of original ideas, did someone say Deus Ex Machina, anybody?

And before you say any more of those head-scratching questions of why the Excalibur is magic without any explanations in an animated film centered on Arthurian Lore, there is a reason why it happened.

Because what you saw here is one of the many plot holes in this messed-up tale, which counts as another problem in this already unoriginal and dated story.

There are certain moments in this film that has never explained certain plot points that I might think that the story is either refused to show some details or is it afraid to tell a little truth about it.

Take the forbidden forest, for example, did it come alive by itself or is it controlled by Merlin to protect the sword? Never explained in this movie.

How about one of the film’s plucky comic reliefs, Bladebeak, did he become a good guy after his wife was in hostage or did she still love him despite he almost got caught cheating earlier?

Again, it is never explained here in the first place because the movie is trying focus on their main stars in the next section:

#2. Its Stereotypical Characters

Talking about animation blackface in this cluster storm, the characters in this film is a stereotype upon every stereotype.

No matter how they tried to develop their characters to make it as relatable and memorable, they sure did a good job at making underwhelmingly forgettable characters that would end up doing the opposite direction in the mindset of a bad fanfiction novel.

In this case, here we could describe the characters in this film by their stereotypes no longer than thirty-five words starting with:

· Kayley, A rebellious teenage girl with a dream of becoming a hero who looked like that one character from a beloved animated film, which I will talk about the film’s elephant in the room later.

· Garret, A blind hermit and love interest to Kayley who has a backstory of how he once lived in Camelot as his home before he became an outsider who stands up on his very own.

· Devon and Cornwell, Two-headed wisecracking dragons who acts like a comic relief who joked about things, the fourth wall, and pop-culture references that didn’t happen yet, ala, a hybrid between the other two animated characters.

· Ruber, A just-your-typical power mongering villain who wanted to take over the entirety of the kingdom because King Arthur has refused to split the land in half, resulting him to betray them and get revenge.

· As to Julianna and the others, they contributed nothing more in their screen time but just to either give more character development to the main characters, create more plot progression or they were just making jokes.

· Special Mention will go to Kaley’s dead father, Lionel, who was just here to be killed off in a undramatic and scientifically inaccurate scene where he got hit on the shield by Ruber’s club.

Before I could go to the next section, I would like to give kudos to the film’s villain, which is hands down, the hammiest villain that animation has ever seen.

That acting alone (Contributed by Gary Oldman) was so over-the-top, it turned him from supposed to be a threatening villain into a more so bad it’s entertaining character.

It just comes to show that outside from the film’s villain, it’s underwhelming characters couldn’t save the film from crashing down the roof as the story’s shopping list of 90s animated film clichés made it collapse under floor along with our next section:

#3. Those Blandly Written Songs

Now before I could nitpick about the songs, I should remind you that I’d don’t mind about musicals, as long is they could progress the film by balancing the songs and dialogue then that’s fine for me.

However, if it tries to make the songs the key role in the entirety of the musical, it is also fine for me.

Unfortunately for Quest for Camelot, that seemed a different case as the film falters its balance between the already messed-up story and its bland and unmemorable songs.

Written by two well-known songwriters, Carole Bayer Sager, wife of the then-former chairman and co-CEO of WB Bob Daly, and David Foster, the songs of this film were clearly screaming their lungs out to make an impact against Disney proving that it failed on hitting the right notes.

Take one example of this mess, in one scene of the film, Kayley was asking Garret if he would help her to search for The ’Sword Ex Machina’ Excalibur, his response was simply “No.”

Because he could find the McGuffin Sword on his own via a song that you can clearly hear the switch from English-Speaking Cary Elwes to the American-Accented singing of Country Music Artist, Bryan White.

The best way to sum the entirety of the scene up is using the magic of abridged video editing to represent a seven-year-old gag.

Aside from the jarring vocal switches, most of the songs from this film (except one) is either bland, generic, forgettable and of course, not worth the tune to know about the lyrics.

Songs like Looking Through Your Eyes or United We Stand tried to mimic the song styles of Elton John, Tim Rice, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman to attempt on making as grand scale and Broadway-like but in the end, the film didn’t take off as they expected to be and ended up being a flop.

Even the villain song of this faltered film tried to make it serious and threatening only to end up making him hammier and overacted like a complete ’66 Batman villain.

But aside from all the completely flawed songs in the soundtrack, there is one good thing that came out of it, that credit would go to The Prayer, Sung by Celine Dion in English and Andrea Bocelli in Italian before teaming up for a duet on separate albums for both artists in bilingual.

When I listened to the duet version of the song, I couldn’t believe my ears that this song is unbelievably memorable and surprisingly moving, it could make a tear in my eyes.

This song represents the theme that Quest for Camelot had failed to cover it in it’s moral, hope, meaning that even at desperate times when things get bleak, you could always pray for hope to find a better path to get out from trouble.

It would make perfect sense to focus on that theme rather than using an idea that done to death in most 90s animated films, but sadly the damage has already done and made film doomed from the start (Which I will talk about that topic later).

As we embark the end of the review, I enter the final section of this problematic film as the storm of cliches and all, started wrecking the film apart from one piece after another, as I hear the clunking sounds of:

#4. Its Lousy, Subpar Animation

Now, this is where the film’s ultimate flaw came into play, but not until I could criticize about its animation, which I think that this feels like it was rushed out of the door just to compete against Disney so they could get in the money banks from the eyes of greedy executives.

This film surely looks that way as the animation whimpered its entirety with choppy animation in some scenes, technical flubs that can be seen on-screen, and even the movement here is so weak that it’s not impressive enough.

I know that there are some sequences would maybe have some good animation in there, but for everything else, the animation couldn’t save the film’s soul from falling by putting a self-Loony Tunes reference and a character cameo from a failed animated sitcom to convince that this is from WB.

Why would I say that is because of the film’s elephant came into the scene, remember how Nostalgia Critic joked about Kayley’s appearance as a teenager who resembles the likeness and imagery of Belle from Beauty and the Beast?

Well, not only that he did get one point on that, but there are even more things that completely ripped some of Disney’s ideas from their adaptations of the time, not just Beauty and the Beast by itself but also Aladdin and it’s spiritual Hamlet, The Lion King.

Few samples include one scene where Kayley was trying to escape from Ruber’s henchmen while Celine’s singing of The Prayer was playing the middle of a chase scene (No, I am not even joking.) feels like it was a shot-by-shot rip-off of Belle getting chased by wolves with a coat of paint.

Followed by an attempt to duplicate Genie’s Friend Like Me with pop-culture references added in for If I Didn’t Have You which contained a Lion King reference that happened in the middle of the film that tried to scam the House of Mouse’s money.

And then we got the big one, the one moment that is so unoriginal and uninspired, it’s unbelievable to look at this mess.

I bring you to the ultimate factor to this monstrosity that would bring all knockoffs and mockbusters to shame.

I am going to end this section and the entirety of the review off with a bang by doing a play-by-play coverage of the last ten minutes of the film, yes dear folks, I’m going back to the deus ex machina ending.

Because this ending is how it feels when they decided to put three Disney climaxes and sandwich them into one, in which that the film had given up ideas to make one.

It all started after Kayley had got caught by Ruber and his henchmen turned mechanical army in an ambush, resulting him to get The Excalibur off from her to merge his hand with the sword, which the comic reliefs, Devon and Cornwall witnessed.

Resulting them to warn Garret that she is held hostage by the villain were he was heading straight to Camelot to conquer the kingdom under his iron fist.

Anyway, onto the climax itself, we see that the storm clouds were gathering around Camelot just like in The Lion King as Ruber gets into Camelot while cloaking his way in ala, the trojan-horsed maneuver while Julianna drives the wagon at his command.

As his plan goes smooth sailing, it wasn’t until one of the wagons had bumped into a rock, leading Kayley (who is tied and gagged) to kick the legs of a henchman to trip him down to the stone road.

While she was avoiding Mr. Saberclaws’ blind attacks from under the wagon, Bladebeak, which I had mentioned before in the Story, was giving her some help by cutting the tied ropes off from her fists while talking to his unnamed wife hen which causes another plot hole.

Leading Kayley to go out in front of Julianna’s wagon and alarmed to the guards, “It’s a Trap!”

Kicking off this climactic sandwich is a villainous rendition of one part of Beauty and the Beast’s climax where the furniture and appliances battle against Gaston’s Angry Mob.

Then it was followed by Camelot going under fire around the city like Pride Rock at the beginning of the climactic Simba vs. Scar fight while the soldiers were fighting for their lives against Ruber’s Army.

On the other hand, Kayley had found a way into the castle’s courtroom via a tower to protect King Arthur, but unfortunately, while she runs her way in, Ruber’s pet Griffin had tried to attack her in a Jafar-as-a-snake-like fashion, destroying the wooden stairs that led into the tower.

It might have seemed like it was the end for her as the two henchmen tried to get her, but wait, those big damned heroes are coming back to help her save the entire kingdom from destruction, uniting the two lovers, Kayley and Garret back together again for this final stand against the villain.

Meanwhile, Arthur gets a surprise visit from his old foe from ten years earlier for one brief scene before cutting back to our supposed-to-be-relatable protagonists finding another way to get into the castle’s courtroom, which Garret had found one in the stables not far off from the wall.

While Silverwings would try to distract the Griffin (Who is still in its Jafar-as-a-snake mode when he’d barely attacked the heroes in surprise, only to get interrupted), Garret and Kayley jumped into the hay carriage to get into the exact location of the shortcut entrance.

Once they reached to the stables, Garret then opened a secret tunnel that leads into the roundtable were Ruber was fighting King Arthur in more of an opposite reenactment of Simba vs. Scar fight were instead of Simba winning the final stand, it was Scar who is beating the crap out of him.

Then, in an out-of-context scene, you got Devon and Cornwall rescuing Silverwings from the hands of the Griffin by fire-breathing, which the writers thought it was a good idea to have the 1978 Superman theme for the two-headed dragons’ heroic moment (Tell that to Zod’s snapped neck).

And then you got a character-defining moment for yet another comic relief, this time it’s for Bladebeak which was completely ripped straight off from Pumba’s ’They call me mister pig’ speech from The Lion King’s climax only it replaces with a Dirty Harry reference out from Sonic’s voice (Jaleel White).

Finally, back to Kayley and Garret at the final stand against Ruber, she gave an insult to him by repeat her father’s words “I will not serve a false king” like any meaningful echoes in 90s Disney musicals as she slammed him off the roundtable with a plank of wood.

And finish off this unoriginal climax as I mentioned by pulling a Deus Ex Machina as Kayley and Garret dodged Ruber’s attack, leading his fused arm to get stuck on the stone since he’s not a rightful king and causing a supernatural-like supernova to turn kingdom back to normal.

Like Aladdin defeating Jafar as a genie, only if he got disintegrated instead of trapping him in the lamp which Ruber had suffered his ultimate death.

So in the end, Kayley and Garret were knighted, Devon and Cornwall know how to fly because they know how to get along, did a little celebration dance like in Beauty and the Beast, and the plot holes were ditched behind without any explanation, the end.

Final Thoughts, Fatal Flaws, and a Conclusion.

As we reached the exit, I wanted to give my last impressions to this already collapsed film before I could leave this behind, which is sad to see how this movie turned out more as battered down when it’s age grow weaker and weaker as time passes.

Not only does this film feel dated like most Disney Knockoffs of the time, but it would have done better as an Arthurian film and a film adaptation.

Which brings me to a topic I want to talk about: The film’s troubled production,

Now here’s one question I’d like to ask, does anyone had read or heard of the YA Arthurian Fantasy novel, The King’s Damosel by Vera Chapman?

If you answered no, then me neither, to honest here, but I would like to share something interesting.

Originally, this film would have been a PG-13 animated film that was going to directed by the husband-and-wife team of FernGully, Bill, and Sue Kroyer, whom his wife would have also worked as one of the producers.

The original premise, which was going to be written by Elizabeth Chandler before getting kicked out by executives, was not only going to follow the source material, but it would also follow the Arthurian legend of Sir Gareth with a feminist twist.

It focuses on Susannah (Originally named Lynette), whom unlike all 90s princesses that were stereotypically rebellious on their lives who dreamed of something bigger, she is an idealistic, independent woman living in the times near the end of the Arthurian days.

She joined King Arthur and his Knights as a messager to send news about the progress of finding the holy grail, but the times went dire when an anonymous threat nicknamed The Red Knight had held her sister, Lyonesse, in hostage.

Now it’s quest to find the grail is in the hands of Susannah to go on a dangerous mission to rescue her sister and get the holy grail to Arthur in an adventure that expanded more into the Arthurian lore.

Now when I read the original premise via an article, this idea would have gotten the potential for a PG-13 animated film that would faithfully adapt both the book and the legend with a dark (but not too much darkness) and mature tone that no animated film had achieved except for Disney’s Hunchback.

Not only it would fit the moral of faith, but also it would have a central theme of the importance of sisterhood, the tribulations of life, and it would have handled gender diversity to make better characters, a more engaging plot, and would have broken new grounds to this medium.

But sadly, that had already been down in the drain when the executives and a director who doesn’t know how animation is as an artform thought it would be better off change the premise to more musical friendly to target at a family-friendly audience.

So creative differences, company mismanagements, production nightmares and over costs had caused certain people to abandon ship (including Bill Kroyer, Sue Kroyer, and Frank Gladstone) and the film to rush out of the door to compete against Disney.

And this is where the movie’s fatal flaw came to fruition where it wasn’t just the cliched story, the stereotypically forgettable characters, the lackluster and rushed animation or its ripped off scenes and imagery of Disney.

But it was because that the film played the execution safe, which it didn’t push any boundaries or broke any new grounds for new creative and original ideas but it was created to make fluff and money, which it is the saddest part when you look at the contributions.

Quest for Camelot had contributed to the flop of Brad Bird’s adaptation of Howard Huges’ The Iron Giant and also marked the beginning of the end of hand drawn animation as CGI went mainstream.

Look, folks, I know that you’re complaining at me because I reviewed something that meant for kids, nothing special about it, but I hate to tell you that your excuses that animation is for kids are bullcrap.

I have seen animated films and shows that have some relevancy with well-developed characters, creative ideas that no one has ever tried it before, and a story that is well written & executed in every single way, even if there are things that were either an underrated gem or it has their dedicated popularity.

Well, sure there certain movies and shows that were decent enough to be watchable despite its flaws, or even down to the point that it could end up as a mixed bag of both positives and negatives.

But for Quest for Camelot, it has become more irrelevant and dated than any other animated films at the time because of both its age and troubled production that continues to haunt animation with the ghetto throughout the years.

And that ghetto will continue to go down the line with a new animated film that I would like to call this The Modern-Day Quest for Camelot, only with a setting update and replace 90s animated film cliches with modern day ones to rip off even animated movies up to eleven.

In short, let’s say that Sony wanted to rape those angsty normies so they could get down with the most popular cool tech toy.

And I swear if someone ever wrote a Picard/Matilda (No not the titular Ronald Dahl character, the other one) fanfiction, then we got a person who has gone on crack with LSD.

Quest for Camelot is a mess as both a musical and an animated film that has a shopping list of clichéd 90s animated film tropes with a dose of plot holes, stereotypically forgettable characters, unmemorable songs, meanderingly rushed out animation and completely unoriginal scenes;

The film hasn't hit any success that the executives were expecting, but instead, this film still hits its formulaic notes even after 20 years.

If you’re looking for an Arthurian animated film outside from The Sword in the Stone, then you might be disappointed since it has barely had to do with the Arthurian lore except for The Excalibur and how King Arthur founded Camelot.

Final Ranking

Story: 22/100

Characters: 34/100

Songs: 28/100

Animation: 26/100

Overall: 28/100 (Thumbs Down)