Jessalyn Gilsig and Andrea Corr .............................. Kayley
Cary Elwes and Bryan White ................................ Garrett
Gary Oldman ............................................ Ruber
Eric Idle ..................................................... Devon
Don Rickles ........................................... Cornwall
Jane Seymour and Celine Dion ..................................... Juliana
Pierce Brosnan and Steve Perry .......................................King Arthur
Bronson Pinchot ........................................ Griffin
Jaleel White ................................................. Bladebeak
Gabriel Byrne ........................................................ Lionel
John Gielgud ........................................... Merlin
Frank Welker .....................................................Ayden
Warner Bros. presentation. Director Frederik Du Chau. Screenplay Kirk DeMicco, William Schifrin, Jacqueline Feather, David Seidler. Producer Dalisa Cooper Cohen. Music Patrick Doyle. Songs David Foster, Carole Bayer Sager. Production designer Steve Pilcher. Editor Standford C. Allen. Running time 1 hour, 35 minutes.
Friday, May 15, 1998
By DAVID KRONKE
Los Angeles Times
Sheer fun in animation, it seems, died with Howard Ashman, the immensely gifted lyricist whose clever wordplay and anything-for-a-laugh rhyming made "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast" and parts of "Aladdin" so enjoyable.
Since his death in 1991, animated features have become big business, but their spontaneity and sense of surprise have given way to manufactured awe. Films have been transformed from light Broadway musicals to full-blown heavier fare like "Lion King," "Pocahontas" and "Anastasia," with their new agey lessons and Sturm und Drang plagued characters. Recent attempts at straight-ahead humor such as "Hercules" have been hampered by the fact that they just weren't that funny.
Warner Bros. inaugurates its new feature animation division with "Quest for Camelot," a project that unfortunately seems a nearly perfect reflection of troubling trends in animated features. It's clearly concocted to recall and distill elements of recent animated successes--so much so, alas, that it lacks a distinct personality of its own.
Arthurian legend is kind of shunted to the side of the story here. Instead, the story concerns a standard-issue spunky female heroine named Kayley. Her father, one of the knights of the Round Table, was killed by the menacing Ruber, an imposing guy whose eye twitches whenever he's considering something really evil.
Kayley, aided by a young blind man named Garrett and a two-headed dragon named Devon and Cornwall who provide the requisite comic relief, must battle Ruber's monsters to make Camelot safe again. Garrett's blindness is the one adventurous element to the film, but even it seems calculated; his lack of sight is hardly debilitating, yet still provides kids a lesson in acceptance.
It seems obvious that the film was demographically structured so that the monsters would make really cool action figures for boys, while girls play with Kayley dolls and younger kids cuddle with plush Devons and Cornwalls.
A number of name performers are recruited for vocal contributions here, including Pierce Brosnan, Gary Oldman, Sir John Gielgud, Jane Seymour, Gabriel Byrne, Eric Idle, Don Rickles, Bronson Pinchot and Cary Elwes. Some are used fleetingly, others are unrecognizable and others just aren't that impressive; the point to using such brand-name talent seems a bit mystifying.
The songs here, by veteran tunesmiths David Foster and Carole Bayer Sager, are polished to the point of tedium. There's little sense of playfulness. Example: Ruber, the villain, uncorks a banal paean to evil: "Let's go back to war and violence / I'm so bored with peace and silence."
In another number, Garrett gravely intones, "All by myself I stand alone" (is there another way?). Then, Garrett and Kayley together proclaim, "Love took me by surprise / looking through your eyes." Apparently, Camelot is just one big adult contemporary radio station.
The kids with whom I saw "Quest for Camelot" were entertained but not wowed (too many songs, they complained) and spent much of the ride home playing critics, naming the cinematic precedents for much of what they saw. The 4-year-old said the story was a cross between "Anastasia" and "Hercules," and that Garrett looked like the post-Beast Prince in "Beauty and the Beast." The 8-year-old cited "The Lion King" as the inspiration for "Quest's" exotic musical opening, and referenced Devon and Cornwall practically back to Abbott and Costello. When filmmakers can't even convince children that their wares are fresh, a reassessment of creative goals may be in order.
Still, given Warners' venerable, wildly entertaining history in animation, it would be foolish to discount the new feature division out of hand. Consider "Quest for Camelot" a test run that shakes the bugs out of the system, and hope for the sort of anarchy that Bugs and his brood used to create in the future.
Adventures of Some Square Pegs at the Round Table
May 15, 1998, Friday
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Los Angeles Times
One of the most glaring indications that all is not well with ''Quest for Camelot,'' the first feature-length animated film by Warner Brothers, is the confusing body language of its central character, Kayley. A plucky Anglo-Irish farm girl who aspires to be a knight at King Arthur's Round Table, Kayley is a mass of odd facial grimaces.
Her too-large popping brown eyes often roll around distractingly and sometimes appear to be crossed. At the same time, her sweet girlish singing voice (Andrea Corr performs Kayley's songs and Jessalyn Gilsig speaks her lines), which suggests a teen-age Celine Dion, seems too tiny and waifish for a hearty lass who dashes around the farm playfully jousting with the animals.
Kayley's facial inscrutability illustrates the importance of visual details in an animated feature. If one ingredient is wrong, it throws off every other element in what must ultimately harmonize into a coherent cartoon mirror of the real world. Rarely in ''Quest for Camelot,'' directed by Frederik Du Chau, do you sense an overriding stylistic or allegorical vision. The movie offers a grab bag of oddball characters who seem unfocused, and its visual rhythms are jerky and spasmodic.
What ''Quest for Camelot'' wants to be, in high-concept terms, is a juvenile, feminist ''Lion King'' with the musical soul of ''Riverdance'' fused with gushy Hollywood pop. Based on Vera Chapman's novel, ''The King's Damosel,'' the movie follows Kayley on a rescue mission from her home in northern England to Camelot after her father (Gabriel Byrne), King Arthur's favorite knight, is slain; the King's magic sword, Excalibur, stolen, and Kayley's mother, Lady Juliana (Jane Seymour), kidnapped.
Kayley has a formidable agenda. She has to save her mother, retrieve Excalibur and prevent the kingdom from being taken over by Ruber (Gary Oldman), an ambitious upstart knight who will do anything to possess the magic sword and rule the world.
Ruber, who stalks Kayley with his henchman, the Griffin (Bronson Pinchot), a giant parrotlike bird that stole the sword for his boss but lost it en route, is a semibald muscle-bound fiend that looks like a red-headed cartoon caricature of Hulk Hogan. As is the case with most of the movie's other characters, Ruber's image and his voice (he speaks in an English working-class accent tinged with an effeminate hauteur) don't quite match.
Along the way, Kayley hooks up with Garrett (Cary Elwes) a handsome young hermit who once worked at Camelot as a stable boy but fled after an accident that cost him his sight. Even by the vanilla standards of animated films, Garrett is a callow Prince Charming surrogate whose bland singing voice (Bryan Whyte) suggests Kenny Loggins on Thorazine.
Joining their party is a quarrelsome two-headed dragon named Devon and Cornwall (Eric Idle and Don Rickles) whose condition is explained by the line, ''This is what happens when cousins marry.'' Because they can't agree on anything, the pair, who get most of the wittier lines in the movie's clunky screenplay, are unable to fly until they stop arguing.
Thrown into this hodgepodge are a bunch of songs with music by David Foster and lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager that are tuneful enough in the Alan Menken mode but that seem gratuitously tacked on. Instead of contributing to the movie, they clog it up.
Coming on the heels of 20th Century Fox's lush but silly ''Anastasia'' (a much better film than this one), ''Quest for Camelot'' suggests that Disney still owns the artistic franchise on animated features. Coming up to bat this Christmas: a Dreamworks foray into the genre, ''Prince of Egypt.''
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Pierce' Filmography