If you’ve never heard of Video Brinquedo then you can count yourself among the lucky ones. They’re known as the Asylum of animated movies for a reason, and that reason is that most of their “films” are extremely cheap, half-hearted ripoffs of far more popular movies. In this category, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything worse than Brinquedo’s very own Ratatoing.
The movie is based not-so-subtly off of Ratatouille. The only difference is all of the charm was sucked out and now all that’s left is an empty husk of what could barely qualify as animation. The characters move robotically and the models look bad even for the original Playstation at times. Absolutely no thought was put into visual design and everything from the supposedly delicious food to the mouse characters looks flat and uninviting. And then there’s this demon cat:
Beyond appearances, the “story” itself is awful. The movie is 40 minutes long and the first 12 minutes consist of characters delivering some very basic exposition and repeatedly complimenting the main restaurant’s food, because apparently Brinquedo thought that children were too dumb to understand that it’s supposed to be good unless it was drilled into their heads for over 25% of the entire movie. Add the recycled animation of the characters gearing up to steal food ingredients and a random dance sequence that has to be seen to believed, and almost half of the entire movie is pure filler.
The other half isn’t much better and features the "heroes" attempting to steal food from humans while keeping their secret to success a secret. And then at the end the mice who wanted to compete with them get sent off to a lab for testing because… they deserved it, or something? It’s kind of messed up. Almost as messed up as Brinquedo having the audacity to include a painting of Mickey Mouse in the background of certain scenes.
What’s really odd is that much of the same cast that did voice work for the Sonic series also did voice work on this movie. Mike Pollock, the voice of Dr. Robotnik, pointed out rightly that such roles are often necessary work for someone who works as a freelance voice actor, but to hear him and others in such a lame role is still odd. Especially since for some reason Pollock’s character can’t stop using “precisely” as an exclamation at random.
This wouldn't be notable if it was just regular bad, but this is a special kind of bad. It's the kind of bad that feels like a slap in the face. I fully recommend it.
