Quest for Camelot

Quest for Camelot (known as The Magic Sword: Quest for Camelot in the United Kingdom) is a 1998 animated musical fantasy film directed by Frederik Du Chau and produced by Warner Bros. Feature Animation. It is loosely based on the novel The King's Damosel by Vera Chapman, which is based on the Arthurian legend.

Plot
In this animated tale, Kayley (Jessalyn Gilsig) dreams of being one of the Knights of the Round Table; she gets her chance when the fabled sword of Excalibur is lost. Without its power to protect him, King Arthur falls victim to Ruber (Gary Oldman), an evil knight bent on destroying Camelot. Arthur's only hope is that Kayley will find the sword. She gets some invaluable assistance from Merlin's trusty falcon, a dragon with a split personality, and a sweet blindman named Garrett (Cary Elwes).

Ruber Qualities

 * 1) One of the main problems with this film is that the writing is abysmal and confusing, as some of the plot details were never even explained, resulting to heaps of plot holes. There are so many of them that listing it will take forever, so here are just a few examples:
 * 2) *Why did Bladebeak become good when he helps Kayley break free? There's not a single scene where he regrets working with the villain.
 * 3) *During the scene where Ruber is preparing to turn his soldiers into weapon-fused monsters with a potion, he said that he obtained it from some witches. What witches?
 * 4) *It doesn't explain why the trees, vines, leaves or any other plants are somehow alive other than being magical.
 * 5) *For no particular reason, both Devon and Cornwall pointlessly throw in a lot of random pop culture references which haven't even existed at the time the film was set in (as mentioned later in RQ #3) as if they could see the future, especially when the film never even explains or elaborates on this at all.
 * 6) *When Lord Ruber dies after accidentally putting Excalibur back into the stone, the resulting burst of power heals everyone (including the dragons). If the sword has the power to heal, why didn't it cure Garrett's blindness?
 * 7) The film itself is an unoriginal Disney rip-off that doesn't even try to be it's own film and was made to cash in on the company's Renaissance days and simply tries to be like any other animated kids film rather than it's own original story, all due to executive meddling on the part of Warner Bros.. It also has extremely poor grasp of the source material.
 * 8) *The original book the film was based on, The King's Damosel, contained a lot of dark and mature themes including rape, and is one of the darkest and most inappropriate books to ever be adapted for a family film, even more so than Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (which was already adapted by Disney into an animated feature film two years prior). In fact, the movie was originally going to be rated PG-13 while keeping some of the book's mature elements, as revealed by Lauren Faust (who helped work on this film), but Warner Bros. decided to heavily "Disneyfy" it in order to compete with its rival.
 * 9) *Brad Bird (who will later go on to direct The Iron Giant) said that micromanaging is the biggest problem for the production as a whole, which worked fine for Disney, but not Warner Bros.
 * 10) A lot of the characters are bland and/or don't contribute much value to the movie.
 * 11) *Kayley is not only a generic and bland protagonist, she is also (as pointed out by the Nostalgia Critic) a rip-off of Belle from Beauty and the Beast, having a similar hairstyle and physical appearance, living on a farm with her one parent (which, in this case, is her mother as opposed to the aforementioned Disney princess, who in her case lives with her father), and having a similar motivation of wanting more out of her life. She's also supposed to be a competent fighter, but most of the time, she ends up being the complete opposite since she either flees from foes or needs to be protected by her allies.
 * 12) *Garrett has an extremely large amount of wasted potential for a disabled badass character, as he's the textbook definition of a Gary Stu. Because despite the fact that he's blind and fully adapted to his disability, he isn't shown to have a single character flaw or weakness at any point during the movie. Not once.
 * 13) *Kayley's mother Lady Juliana, Merlin and Bladebeak are all bland and don't do much other than being filler characters, with Bladebeak being another unfunny comic relief character much like Devon and Cornwall.
 * 14) *Lord Ruber is easily one of the worst movie villains of all-time, even by animated movie standards. As his insane personality is extremely inconsistent since sometimes he snaps at those around him while other moments have him acting calm and collected. Not to mention that his song is absolutely dreadful and one of (if not the) worst incorporated and written song in the film, and that's saying a lot.
 * 15) *Devon and Cornwall (the two-headed dragon) are not only unfunny comic relief characters whom are pale dragon version rip-offs of Timon and Pumbaa from The Lion King but with none of the charm and likability both Timon and Pumbaa had, but they also pointlessly throw in a lot of random pop culture references for no valid reason whatsoever such as Elvis Presley and television in an attempt to be like the Genie from Aladdin (without actually understanding why Aladdin and the Genie character as a whole worked so well) and, during their song sequence "If I Didn't Have You", they even throw in a Lion King reference, as well as references to Warner Bros. own properties such as Looney Tunes and Tex Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood (which co-incidentally, was already owned by Warner Bros. following the Time Warner-Turner Entertainment merger two years prior).
 * 16) Some of the songs in this film are not only bad, but also come out of nowhere, like with Kayley and Garrett's "Looking Through Your Eyes" and the Dragons' "If I Didn't Have You". Sometimes, they get played at inappropriate times, such as "The Prayer" (which plays during a chase scene) and the Superman Theme getting unnecessarily played when Devon and Cornwall fight the griffin and rescue Ayden. Most of them also feel like they were present, not because of how they suit the plot itself, but in order to copy Disney 's formula without even understanding why Disney 's formula worked so well.
 * 17) *To be fair, a ballad song like "The Prayer" playing over an action-packed chase scene could've worked, only when the scene in question is set in slow-motion and the sound effects in the background are muted, because otherwise it'd result to a tonal disconnect.
 * 18) The animation, while nonetheless good, can get a little weird at times. The most noticeable example of this being the animation for the characters, which more often than not doesn't flow naturally with the backgrounds and have movements where they're movements don't have enough of their bodies moving like they should. And almost all of their animation has a sort of CGI-look to them. Which, when all factors are combined, make them look like statues that just came to life (in the words of TheMysteriousMrEnter). And the fact that sometimes they look like CGI and sometimes they just don't collide well with their backgrounds leaves the animation looking inconsistent. For example, some scenes, like the town dance scene, have certain characters moving too fast while others don't move enough/at all (as well as people phasing through each other in one shot). Also at several points, the irises in Ruber's eyes tend to very briefly disappear for at least one frame. And most of the CGI (especially the one for the rock ogre) has not aged well, to say the least.
 * 19) The movie can't decide if it wants to be a Disney movie knock-off to cash in on their renaissance or a Warner Bros. film at heart, as the movie throws a lot of Warner Bros. cartoon references, such as the ACME name for Ruber's magic potion, a cameo from Red Hot Riding Hood and the brief Road Runner-like scene during the Dragons' song.
 * 20) Incredibly crappy dialogue, with a lot of bad lines such as Ruber's infamous "The ogre's butt!".
 * 21) The film overuses cartoon stock sound effects, usually on the scenes involving the comic relief characters like Devon and Cornwall, especially in their "If I Didn't Have You" song sequence, which can get annoying after a while.

Camelot Qualities

 * 1) The animation, even if it doesn't meet Disney standards, is good due to it being worked on by the same animators of The Iron Giant a year later.
 * 2) Decent voice acting, despite the talents being ruined. Even Gary Oldman claimed that he had fun in his voice role as Lord Ruber.
 * 3) The musical score, composed by Patrick Doyle, is pretty good mostly.
 * 4) *Even though it got started with this film and placed in the chase scene, "The Prayer" went on to become a really popular song, sung by Celine Dion in English and Andrea Bocelli in Italian.
 * 5) **Speaking of the songs, while most of them are bad and come out of nowhere, some of them can be pretty good like "United We Stand", "On My Father's Wing" and "I Stand Alone". Even songs like "Looking Through Your Eyes", "If I Didn't Have You", and "The Prayer" can be pleasing to listen to on their own.
 * 6) The concept of a fantasy film based on a King Arthur legend is an interesting one, if poorly executed.

Reception and Legacy
The film received mixed-to-negative reviews from critics with a 45% "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The websites critical consensus reads "Diminished by uneven animation and treacly songs, Quest for Camelot is an adventure that ought to be tossed back to the Lady in the Lake".

The failure of Quest for Camelot had a negative impact on Warner Bros. Feature Animation studio, as they decided to barely promote subsequent animated films produced since then, including its much better-received films such as The Iron Giant (although it received positive reviews, it bombed at the box office), which was followed by Osmosis Jones, having a similar production hell as Quest for Camelot and received similar reception, causing the studio to be scaled down. This film wasn't the stroke that broke the camel's back (that would be Looney Tunes: Back in Action), but it did put a death knell to the studio from now on until they were shut down in 2004.

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