>>35725>>35722I recently watched the Dreamworks Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken Movie. It was pretty lame to be honest, and it's entire plot feels like a femcel movie where beautiful girls are evil and "ugly" non-traditionally beautiful girls are hidden beauties in a lazy "be yourself" message. It's a plot that has existed for a long time, but in this particular film it's quite a step over something like Heathers.
They were REALLY banking on discount Ariel to bring in tickets out of spiting Disney and it justifiably lost a lot more money simply because the movie was terrible looking and had a very mediocre story to begin with.
Now I've never liked yurishit because it's almost never good, but unironically I think the movie (probably) wouldn't have flopped (as hard) if it actually was a romance between Ruby and Chelsea instead of whatever nonsense it turned out to be. Sure some people wouldn't like a lesbian movie but if it's done tastefully it'd be at least interesting. Hell it has a typical "enemies to friends/lovers" vibe.
Also, it had a really bad schedule to release in movie theaters all around. The new Spiderverse movie just hit cinemas and was destroying the box office in money and the Mario movie was released to home video after it made a world record for highest grossing animated movie yet. Production wise it is a significant downgrade from Puss in Boots 2. But at least it has something for the fetish-audience; giantess, tentacles, etc.
TL;DR: It's a typical teen drama movie but as one review for it said,
there's a simpler, more sincere movie underneath it all that seems to be taunting audiences, like a glowing shape from deep below. If they took some more time to streamline the story it would have been pretty good I think, though the art style was frankly too janky and Illumination-tier rubbery. It's similar to Turning Red tbh, an interesting concept playing with mythologies within a modern human society, but its done horribly. Cheap girl movies like Aquamarine were better executed than this.