I’ve seen quite a number of animated films over the years. Some of them have been great, a few excellent ones and a considerable number of middle of the road stuff. Then on the other side there is the bad and the truly abysmal, the films which have 'won' one star reviews from this reviewer (and will continue to); yet as bad as some of these films have been (and some of them have been pretty bad), little compares to the horror that is Titanic: The Animated Movie. And yes I’m including such things as most of the Land Before Time sequels and Secret of NIMH 2; yes, to me Titanic is worse than everyone’s ‘favourite’ direct-to-video sequel.

Titanic biggest problem is consistency, in that it doesn’t have any. The animation goes from unimpressive but smooth to so choppy you’d think they had filmed it using a time-lapse camera. This is exasperated by the filmmakers attempts at working shading into various scenes, which changes from soft to hard to non-existence, most times within the same sequence of shots. The end result is difficult on the eyes, and getting a headache from a film doesn’t do it much in the way of favours.

All the characters have been ransacked from various Disney and Don Bluth films as well as James Cameron’s live-action film; Angelica’s relationship to her stepmother and stepsisters is straight out of Cinderella – as is her relationship with Maxie the Mouse. Maxie himself, is a clone of Fievel from the American Tail films. Angelica and William love story, which makes the bulk of the films story, is basically a reversal of Cameron’s version, only with the genders changed. All the characters are stereotypes of one kind of another and none of them have anything interesting to do or say.

And none of this matters because everyone’s going to die anyway right? Well no, for some reason best left unknown, the filmmakers, or whoever adapted it, have decided to start the film at the end, well at the sinking of the Titanic. This kind of makes the rest of the film somewhat redundant, especially since the animation is all going to used again later and it’s the bad choppy type. Yet the film goes on regardless, flashing back to the ‘beginning’ with Angelica on a train looking at her locket.

Then, just as your thinking that the film can’t possibly get any worse one of the characters, the dog Fritz, saves Maxie, then goes into the most cringe worthy rap number I’ve ever heard. The animation for this sequence is used, overused and abused (some of it even gets reused later), its also sloppy and irrelevant to the rest of the film; in fact it could have been added by whoever did the English dub.

Although some of the animation is better here and there (in the sense that it scans if nothing else), none of it has any style or sense of emotion, the characters are all one-dimensional and uninteresting; the story has no bite and parts of the movie are so inconsequential you wonder what the makers were thinking. The dialogue is terrible and poorly performed by actors who may be realising that they're starring in crud. Nothing grabs your attention and you have no reason to side with anyone or care about any of them. In fact the only interest that I can think anyone would have in watching this film is to see just how bad it actually is.

In essence, Titanic is a totally unworthy and unwanted film, seemingly created to capitalise on the success of Cameron’s live-action version and make money quickly in its wake. It is a gross embarrassment to the Italian film industry, heck it a gross embarrassment to film full stop. Few can reach its shallow depths of incompetence and bizarreness, ever fewer films of its ‘caliber’ get theatrical releases.

Leave at the bottom of the ocean.