Customer Reviews

Swans By Hans Christian Anderson [VHS]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

the story was similar, but the animation was not. I still cannot find the one I watched as a child.

I've had this video for years and I just recently watched it again, remembering how much I adore it. It's hokey at times and the animation is not that good, but the songs are catchy (to the point of using the basic Sound Recorder and an old microphone taped to my TV to get the music on my computer). I still get chills from that scene before the actual feature starts, when it shows the queen turning the princes into swans with the creepy music.

All in all, a wonderful nostalgic movie.

This timeless,classic tale from Hans Christian Anderson starts when a wicked Queen marries a king with 13 wonderful children,she then casts an evil spell on the children that turns the 12 boys into swans and banishes the only daughter Lisa from the kingdom.Lisa searches, finally finds her brothers and seeks to undo the terrible spell cast upon them.With much difficulty saving her brothers,she must take a vow of silence and for that reason,almost loses her own chance for happiness.Love and dedication is the essence of Swans.The excellent animation and beautiful songs are highly admirable in this video!!

SWANS IS THE MOVIE OF CHOICE
My family has watched our copy a million times! There's just something about it. I love when the voice actors seem to forget their lines, or just say weird stuff, it's really funny. The music is epic. The animation is beautiful and it's obviously over-dubbed in english. I just found the original on wikipedia: "The Wild Swans (Russian: ''''' '''''', Dikiye lebedi) is a 1962 Soviet traditionally-animated feature film directed by the husband-and-wife team of Mikhail Tsekhanovsky and Vera Tsekhanovskaya." which I plan to watch ASAP.

an intellectual treat! a wild adventure! it's like an unending earthquake! i come from a large family with many cousins and we've grown up watching "the swans". although it's a wee children's movie it contains many life lessons for later on in life, like courage, love, and perserverence. A less subtle lesson contained in the film is that stinging nettles hurt like heck, but if you have great skills you can make a pretty rad sweater with them. we love the movie :)

I do not know much about this movie's origins, but the story is quite simple. It's adapted from Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, THE WILD SWANS, in which a wicked enchantress casts a spell on twelve boys, turning them to swans(...).

A fairy tale as lovely as this deserves a classic treatment, and visually, this animated movie is quite lovely to look at. The animation, the backgrounds, and the stylized artistry are all gorgeously rendered... almost something inbetween a Disney movie and Russian/Czecholsylvakian/Danish paintings. It's obviously an older movie, too; it's plain to see how somewhat static the animation looks in comparison to today's features and the classical-sounding music sounds like it could have been recorded from the 50's. I do not know if this movie was a success or not, but it is an interesting, beautiful tapestry of a fairy tale.

Unfortunately, its U.S. release is another matter. Released by JUST FOR KIDS!, it appears that there are a lot of flaws which bog down this picture. The most noticeable oddity are the songs. Yes, the film is a musical, but I have a feeling that was more opera-oriented. In the U.S., however, the songs are rock/pop ditties by Bullets. Normally, I am not against this (some Japanese Anime films which had rescores for the U.S. I saw -- notably KIKI'S DELIVERY SERVICE and CASTLE IN THE SKY -- had been able to get away with this quite successfully), but here in SWANS the rock music, although catchy, clashes horrendously with the fairy tale quality of the picture. In addition to which the U.S. voice work is a mixed bag. The voices are mostly phony, cartoonish-sounding and would probably work well in a different film, but they not only fail to match the characters, the synchronization is so painful that the results come off as laughably bad. (Added to which, the brothers and sister sound older than they should... even when they are children!)

I have seen very few dubs of foreign animated films which come across as so poor (because I've found more good ones than horrible ones), but SWANS happens to be one such example. It's no wonder that this one is already in obscurity. The movie is beautiful to look at, yes, but the painful-to-watch Americanization "treatment" it got ultimately seals its doom. This is a shame, for this really could have been a pretty good treat for kids. The saddest fact, though, is that even youngsters will turn down the U.S. soundtrack when they notice how it does not match up to the visuals. Even the worst dubbed Japanese Anime I've seen (few fortunately) are more watchable than this one.