My Thoughts on Legends of Chima

Well here's my first true blue blog review. I'm a little nervous but here we go. So I placed a bet with my little brother that I'd watch the first season of Legends of Chima and in exchange he'd watch the awesome period drama Call the Midwife. So I saw Chima and what did I think?

Holy cow it was embarrassing.

If there's any redeeming quality it's the animation. The animations looks rather nice with some bright colors and occasional good lighting. Looks better then most 3-D animation in television nowadays so there's another positive. There's also some funny lines every now and again in episodes and there's a kinda epic battle at the end.

So there are my positives.

And now for the negatives. This is where it get's fun.

The voice acting. OH GOD THE VOICE ACTING. It's some of the worst I've ever heard in my life and this is coming from the guy whose heard Adam Sandler do voice acting. The main lion Laval literally sounds like the gay surfer cousin of Captain Planet, the main crocodile sounds like he has a frog in throat and everyone else just doesn't sound invested in the project. They just sound like they're doing it to pay the electric bill. It feels like they're sitting in the recording booth doing this:

This is especially bad because in the finale there's this sorta kinda not really death scene and these characters are saying this heartfelt dialogue but the voice acting is so poor that I had to restrain myself from laughing the entire time. To give an example of good voice acting go hear Sam Witwer's work as Darth Maul in Star Wars: The Clone Wars where he's horrifying.

Also the show is shockingly racist. The lions and eagles are almost always as the top people and better then everyone else, while the crocodiles and wolves are sterotypical jerkasses, the rhinos are completely lacking in intelligence, the ravens are swindling thieves, the bears do NOTHING AT ALL, the beavers are obsessed with fixing things (ironically the only logical portrayal in the whole show) and probably the thing that annoyed me the most: the gorillas as hippies. GORILLAS. If anything bonobos would be the hippies and gorillas would be the stoic badasses like Gandalf.

Could have been worse. The gorillas could have looked like this

The show also has a really bad sense of humor and episodes are riddled with terrible jokes that even Will Smith action movies would throw out for being too obvious. And as for that whole Rhino/Eagle romance thing:

Seriously what the actual hell?

Also besides having a cliched as all heck theme song, the show keeps randomly throwing in mythology and even an origin story. And every time I heard it it felt like they just made this up as they recorded the episode not like an actual mythology or culture. And whenever they to explain it or add to it (because it wasn't stupid or complicated enough) I'm left with this attitude:

Also the only characters who have any legit backstories either don't get any justice or are mocked and made fun of by our so-called "heroes" and I'm like:

The worst part is: the concept could have worked. This could have been a really cool, Jim Henson Dark Crystal or Game of Thrones style fantasy series minus Game of Thrones constant death, sex and perversion. Just give this show to someone like Guillermo del Toro or Peter Jackson and you'd have a pretty epic animal show. Instead we got the show we have now accompanied with it's stolen Thundercats designs (seriously look at the lions and try and tell me they don't look like the Thundercats).

And finally there's that Chi. That stupid flippin Chi. It's the very definition of deux-ex machina. It's only used whenever the plot demands it and we know nothing about it, how it works or how the waterfalls in the floating Avatar mountains create the Chi in the lion temple pool?

So I guess Chi literally is created by "just add water?"

Final thoughts: this is one of those you have to see to believe in how bad it is. Like seriously. It makes a pretty fun MST3K-style riff though.

I give it a 1 out of 4.

Nat is out! Peace!