The Worst Titanic Movie Ever Made (So Far)

This isn’t the first time I’ve reviewed a Titanic film for Taking Up Room, or for a So Bad It’s Good Blogathon (Remember that Asylum monstrosity where the Statue of Liberty was facing the wrong way? Or how about Raise the Titanic? Yikes.). It is, however, the first time I’ve reviewed a Titanic film with a dog that raps.

Yes, you read that correctly.

2000’s Titanic: The Legend Goes On… is an Italian animated film which I guess was intended to introduce children to the Titanic disaster. Or capitalize off of the disaster and the James Cameron movie. Or a combination of all three? It’s hard to say. People seem divided on why this thing exists.

It all opens at Southampton, where passengers are boarding the Titanic. Humans and animals. Including a cute little mouse family bound for America and a mouse mariachi band, one member of whom bears a remarkable resemblance to Speedy Gonzalez. Yeah. We’ve got dogs, cats, and a bird, and they have their own teeny gangplank.

On the human side of things, Angelica, her evil stepmother, Gretchen and two stepsisters, Bernice and Hortense, are bound for America to find husbands. Well, for Bernice and Hortense, anyway. These three harpies like to cast it up to Angelica that she’s a foundling, she’ll never find her real mother, and so on, and they go out of their way to be mean to her. Not to mention, she shouldn’t even think about going to the party that’s being thrown for all the passengers because she has nothing to wear and no one is going to lend her anything.

Major Cinderella vibes going on here, of course, as well as 101 Dalmatians and An American Tail. Angelica might not have glass slippers, but she does have a fairy godmother of sorts and a handsome prince, a nice fellow named William she met on board ship. She’s also got a locket with a picture of a woman who she thinks is her mom and is hoping to find someday, only the locket has gone missing.

Oh yeah, and about the animals below decks. In a kind of “Town Mouse, Country Mouse” scenario, after the dog, Fritz raps for no discernible reason, never mind that rap music didn’t exist in 1912, the animals plan a party. Everyone has to bring food based on what class they belong to, and while they’re at it, they’re supposed to help Angelica get her locket back because she’s a nice person who’s kind to animals. It’s no big deal, though. A little Mission: Impossible-style derring do, and they’re in business.

And where does this big take-back take place? Why in the cabin of Molly, the singer with ship’s band, of course. She got the locket from a snake in the grass named Gaston and has two pet Dalmatians. She’s not too happy when she finds out Gaston is a thief.

And oh yeah, the ship is supposed to sink. The ending is mostly happy, though, and we know that because the movie tells us, “They all lived happily ever after!”

Um, (probably jobless) Italian filmmakers? The Titanic sank. People died. A lot of people. Treating it as a mild annoyance at best and an inconvenience at worst is tacky and insensitive.

This movie is terrible in so many ways, and it goes way beyond my not being part of its target demographic or taking it too seriously. It’s hugely inaccurate; for instance, there was no female band singer or a male one, for that matter. There were no animals partying with a mouse-y mariachi band in the hold. The movie also shows glass breaking and the ship shaking when it hit the iceberg, when in reality most passengers didn’t notice anything until the engines stopped.

The film also glosses over how painfully scary the sinking really was, which is understandable for a kids’ movie, but for how much of the sinking they showed it probably would have been better if they had just skipped over that part and cut to the survivors.

I already mentioned how ludicrous it is to see Fritz rapping, but what we haven’t talked about yet is Molly, who belts out her songs like a frustrated Whitney Houston. And she sings the same lines over and over again. Ignoring her is a good idea, but be warned that as the movie goes on she just keeps singing louder, especially once the ship starts sinking, and no, we never hear “Nearer My God, To Thee.”

These are just some of the historical inaccuracies, but they pale in comparison to how bad the animation is in this film. Almost every character, especially the women, looks like any Disney stepsister we can mention, and it seems like a law that every body part has to move at least five times in every shot, as if these characters are made out of Jell-O. They were really trying to go for a Don Bluth thing here, but it looks as if things went too far.

I wish I could say Titanic: The Legend Goes On… has some redeeming features. The backgrounds look nice, almost like watercolors, although they were done cheaply, but backgrounds do not a good animated film make, as we all know. Introducing kids to Titanic is fine, but there have been better ways of doing it. This, unfortunately, isn’t one of them.

For more of the Sixth So Bad It’s Good Blogathon, please click here. Thanks for reading, guys, and I hope you’re enjoying all our great posts. Hope to see you tomorrow for the wrap-up…

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Titanic: The Legend Goes On… can be viewed on YouTube.

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