Hercules (1995)

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

I recently picked up two Mill Creek DVD sets containing eight animated literary works for children and HERCULES (1995) was the only one in the bunch that wasn't made in the 1980s. It turned out to be the best in terms of animation, design and storytelling. The others, which included ROBIN HOOD, TOM SAWYER, THE THREE MUSKETEERS, and BLACK BEAUTY were all from Burbank Films Australia, while HERCULES is from a different company, Jetlag. HERCULES also boasts a Japanese director and a number of Japanese animation personnel employed for a production that originated in the west. The other films in these sets all tend to lean heavily on cartoonish designs and voices, while HERCULES is more serious and straightforward. The character design here may be a tad simple for my tastes, but the backgrounds depicting the mythical era of Mount Olympus and ancient Greek legends are quite meticulously drafted and rendered. I thought the action animation, particularly the battle with the Nemean lion and the encounter with the shape-shifting sea god Nereus, was quite well done. While the level of imagination is not as high as we'd get in a Japanese-originated production, I thought this one offered a concise 50-minute telling of the Hercules story, from childhood to adulthood, with the famous Twelve Labors condensed considerably. There's a reassuring child-friendly ending that doesn't quite jibe with my memories of the tale's conclusion from childhood readings.

Hercules is neither among the best or worst of Jetlag's animation. I found it solid and entertaining on its own merits, with both its good things and debits. Hercules' debits come from the animation, which suffers from jerky movements in the action sequences, exaggerated facial expressions and a rather generic character design for Megara, some rather corny voice acting and of the Jetlag outings Hercules always had some of the weakest singing especially in the song Greek Mythology. However, while I wasn't taken with the animation overall, I admit I did like the muscular bodies of the men. The script is amusing, the characters are reasonably engaging and the story is straightforward in its telling and mostly thrilling even if I would've rathered a longer length to make a couple of the twelve labours more believable. The music has been better in other Jetlags, but the songs are not too bad, Son of Zeus being the best one, and the accompanying music is rousing. On the whole, entertaining and a decent Jetlag animation but not recommended as one of their best. 7/10 Bethany Cox