Why was it such a misfit?

Is it indeed the nuttiest Nutcracker? All I know is it wasn't nutty enough.

This is a remake of a much earlier, much shorter review (you can find the original here).

I have a fascination with the more oddball entries in Disney's animated feature history, and one of them is 2007's Meet The Robinsons, because its production was split between two different eras of the company. It started development in the late Eisner days, where the exec was super desperate and willing to rhrow anything at the wall, like a break-dancing dinosaur or a group of singing frogs. Mid-production John Lasseter took control, whose tastes were more touchy-feely (and how!) His contribution was the orphan stuff and the heartfelt moments near the end. The final product was a realistic, down-to-earth movie that was totally off the wall and swarming with magic robots.

And I bring this up because The Nuttiest Nutcracker feels pretty similar. It wants to be manic and crazy and irreverent, but it also wants to be completely reverent at the same time. It doesn't really blend, and it also completely botches the relevant parts, but we'll get into the why and how in a moment.

As we pan through a CG metropolis, the words "THE NUTCRACKER" appear onscreen, but then a fairy who is also a talking fruit comes to change it with a wand. "Yeah, you figure it's the same-old same-old, but THIS one's got a nutty little TWIST." She turns the logo into...THE NUTTIEST NUTCRACKER! (Thanks to the reader who donated his copy, taped off THIS TV in Knoxville, TN. It originally aired on CBS and concurrently launched as a VHS feature at the same time.)

People love seeing the imperfections of 60's yuletide films. But it's not the same with computer animation -- this didn't look very polished then, and it looks even worse now. We focus on a plastic girl named Marie. Marie is dismayed that her parents still haven't arrived for Christmas. Her bearded uncle, Drosselmeier, bursts into the room at that point and says with the unmistakable growl of Jim Cummings, "It's the storm that is making them late." Hearing this reasonable explanation does not calm her down.

In fact Marie just suddenly tosses out "I wish Christmas would go away forever!" This may be the first holiday production I've ever seen where the person who says that doesn't have her wish immediately granted and then has to spend the rest of the runtime trying to undo the wish. That's not the plot of The Nutcracker anyway, but a way to negate the entire season has been bolted onto it. Uncle Drosselmeier points to the star at the top of their Christmas tree and states, "As ;long as the star is there to shine its light...Christmas will always be!" The special eventually makes it clear that he's not exaggerating. The tree topper in Marie's house is cosmically responsible for the existence of the idea of Christmas and if it is ever lost, the entire holiday will cease to be.

If you think that's weird, well...we're about to meet the talking food.

There are a bunch of assorted nuts in a bowl that are absolutely distraught over Marie wishing there was no Christmas, There's an impressive lineup of actors voicing them: Cheech Marin, Nathan Lane, Tress MacNeille, Desiree Goyette and some others. Drosselmeier tries to raise Marie's spirits by letting her open one of her Christmas presents early. It's the nutcracker that gives this story its title. But as the story usually goes, her brother Fritz grabs the toy from her hands and starts playing with it -- and seems to break it.

The nuts explain to the audience and to each other that Marie's nutcracker is no ordinary wooden figure...he's a transformed prince. The prince was once engaged to a beautiful princess, but his neighbor the Rat Queen was jealous of them both. She turned the princess ugly and changed the prince into wood. He's remained this way for who knows how long, because the princess is long gone and only the kiss of true love can break the spell.

But the flashbacks reveal the princess looked a lot like Marie. And when Marie puts the nutcracker into a cabinet for safekeeping, she kisses it first. Right on the lips, which is weird behavior, but it's what the doctor ordered and it's how we get the story rolling.

After she's made out with her doll, Marie curls up on the living room couch and goes to sleep. The Rat Queen's descendant, Reginald the Rat King, takes this as his cue to enter the picture. As he explains in elaborate song and dance, Reginald captures sentient fruits and veggies and uses them as slaves for his cheese mines. He's also very full of himself and wears gold-plated underwear.

Reginald orders his army of mice onto the battlefield, where they're met with rows of steadfast tin soldiers. The mice quickly overwhelm the soldiers and the boys retreat to the dining table...where the food is waiting for an ambush. "FOOD FIIIIIGHT!" the Marin macadamia screams, and scores of broccoli and brussels sprouts parachute onto the scene.

This battle sequence is pretty much the only reason to seek this special out. It's interesting to look at if anything, as the rats are assaulted by overweight oranges, vicious cauliflower, a Rastafarian potato, and so on and so forth. The Nathan Lane Nut is giving a live play-by-play from a sportscaster's desk, It's enough commotion to wake up Marie, but nobody seems to care there's a giant human witnessiing all this.

Just as it looks like the Rat King might eke out a victory, that's when the six-inch-tall Prince finally comes to life and challenges him personally. They have a swordfight atop some presents until Reginald tells the Prince to "look at the comet over there" and clangs away his sword when he does. It's easy for Reginald to drive the Prince precariously to the edge of a box at thait point -- until the towering Marie appears, demanding the rat stop picking on him.

Reginald's ego knows no bounds and he demands his mouse army take the girl prisoner. "Uh, that might be difficult..." one mouse says, staring up at her. "She's kinda...tall."
"OH, AND I'M NOT??" Reginald rages. He is shorter than they are.

Reginald is not only unintimidated by Marie he believes he has a romantic shot with her. He climbs on her leg and starts kissing it, causing Marie to wince in revulsion and kick him across the room. Her new suitor will not be deterred, and follows her up the ladder next to the tree when she climbs it. She starts grabbing ornaments off the tree and throwing them at him, and when she gets to the star, every edible item in the room screeches "OOOHHHHHHH NOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

Throwing Reginald the star would be exactly what he wants. "JUST WHAT I NEED TO RULE THE CHRISTMAS KINGDOM FOREVER!" he states conveniently. Marie, having now been clued into this, just kicks him again. Then....well, this is unexpected....Uncle Drosselmeier enters the room and reveals he's a magical being who orchestrated the whole event. Yup, he was magic the whole time. Then he shrinks Marie down to six inches tall so she can join the adventure, and so it won't look so weird when she kisses the Prince next time.

This causes an immediate problem, though it isn't apparent to anyone it's Drosselmeier's fault. Marie still has the star in her hand. It's not on the tree anymore. If it is not ON THE TREE by midnight, Christmas will cease to be. Now if Marie were still normal size, she could solve this in seven seconds, but Drosselmeier had to go and Drossel it up.

So what's the solution now? Do these tiny people have to spend the special scaling that massive tree? No, forget that -- the way to re-top the tree is to go to the Christmas Kingdom and ask the Sugarplum Fairy to do it for them. Oh yeah, the rat mentioned that place, didn't he? Where is it?

"Why, it's been here all along!" the Prnce tells Marie. "How?" Marie asks. "I've lived here all my life and never seen it."
"Well, that's just because you need to BELIEVE IN IT WITH YOUR HEART," the Prince points out. Ah, it's one of those things. So Marie takes a deep breath full of belief and suddenly, a big massive glow-portal appears near the present pile.

Everyone's so full of belief they've gotta sing about it...so they do. It's in gospel style. "BELIEVE WITH YOH HULL HART AND YOU'LL SEE THAH MOST MI-RA-CU-LOUUUUS THINGS!" they sing while raising their arms and jumping. When you have talking computer-animated vegetables singing gospel and one of them bears a way-too-close resemblance to Archibald Asparagus, you have to wonder how close The Nuttiest Nutracker was willing to cut it without being sued.

They walk through the portal and enter the Christmas Kingdom, which is made of snow and candy. Meanwhile, the Rat King is in his castle / cheese factory, still obsessed with Marie AND obtaining the star. He sees a way to get both when he looks through his binoculars and sees Marie on her journey, wearing the star as a pendant for ONLY THIS SHOT. When we see Marie again 15 seconds later the star is not there. It appears and disappears constantly from this point. Some shots she's wearing it and some shots she isn't.

Like the Wicked Witch and her flying monkeys, Reginald commands his mouse army to fly toward Marie and snatch her away. Can mice fly in this skewed reality? They cannot -- each mouse has his own hoverbike. This is a lot of bikes for a lot of mice. The cheese trade must pay handsomely.

"How close are we to the Sugarplum Fairy's castle?" Marie asks the Prince. "What does it look like?"
The Prince points into the distance and says, "See for yourself!"
There's nothing there, and Marie tells him as much. The Prince says she needs to look again and BELIEVE IN IT WITH HER....wait a cotton pickin' minute. She already did this. Obviously she believes in the Christmas Kingdom and everything in it, or she would not be standin' there. Why does the Sugarplum Fairy's castle require a double shot of belief to manifest itself?

Because it just does. And after it fades into view, they're about to step toward it when the Flying Biker Mice From Marshmallows arrive. They get Marie pretty much with no struggle, and the Prince just waves his fist after them, yelling "REGINALD, YOU RASCAL!"

One dissolve later Marie is a prisoner in the cheese factory. "Now Christmas will be over forever....and it's all my fault." What? WHAT??

HOW is this Marie's fault? HOW? Her kidnapping was entirely out of her hands! Every setback from the start of this story until now has been the fault of someone else! It's her uncle's fault for shrinking her while she had the star, it's Reginald's fault for having no sense of boundaries, it's the Prince's fault for barely doing anything when the mice showed up! Marie is 100% innocent! WHY IS THIS HER FAULT??

A few seconds after that remark of hers, the.....Prince......appears.......wait, how? We just saw him back on the trail. He could not possibly get here this fast. And he's not even helping her, except psychologically -- he's singing a slow sappy song about how she should never give up and how love will always be with her. But nothing about how it's not her fault.

The Prince fades away....okay, it was just a fantasy sequence of hers, fair. A mouse enters the room and says Reginald requests her presence.

Weird to go right from a dungeon to a throne. Reginald says she's his Christmas Queen now, and puts a crown on her head. "It's 14 Karat Camembert," they tell her. It's made of cheese. That could get messy.

Reginald is wearing the star now, and crows victory. At the stroke of midnight, the Christmas Kingdom will belong to him! "But you'll end Christmas forever!" Marie points out. "No more giving, no more family and friends gathering with Christmas joy...don't you care about any of that? Don't you care about anyone other than yourself?"
"Why should I? I mean, nobody cared about ME," Reginald retorts with. "No one ever gives me anything."

What do you NEED in the first place, you rich rodent? What REASON should someone have to care about you? I'll give the special this: it's realistic to have a spoiled narcissist hear about someone else's problems and then make them about himself.

At this point the Prince and his posse catch up to Reginald's factory. They sneak into the building in a montage set to "Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies," dispatch the mouse guards one by one, and then the Prince rope-swings into Reginald's foyer in dramatic fashion to take him on.

Reginald can't believe he's there. "THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE!" he tells him.
Marie snatches the star off him and repeats the mantra, "Anything's possible if you just believe."

The friuts and veggies join them, but Reginald's mice quickly capture them for the mines. Marie tries to make an escape, but winds up on the ledge of a tower because she didn't think about the fact she was so high up. The Prince snatches a hoverbike and grabs her, but Reginald has mounted another bike and is in pursuit.

The Prince tries to lose him by steering into a mine shaft. It's been less than a minute since their capture, but their food friends are somehow already in there, toiling away. They see an escape and grab onto the hoverbike, and when it leaves the shaft it's got about twenty folks hanging from it.

Where's the star now? It's dangling from the foot of the smallest nut at the bottom. How'd it get there? I don't know, this whole story's pretty sloppy if you haven't noticed by now. Point is that it seems like Reginald can easily get it, until he can't -- because his bike runs out of gas right then and there. He plummets into a cheese river.

Looks like they're home free -- no, Marie wants to go back for Reginald. Any particular reason? Is she gaining affection for him after all? Does this end with her dumping the Prince to live as a Rat Queen forever and have little furry half-human-half-rat abominations? Gotta admit I wouldn't see that coming.

No, Marie is rescuing Reginald because, even though he's a lout, she's virtuous enough to not leave anyone in trouble. That doesn't mean Reginald is suddenly going to do the right thing. The star is back on her neck again (just go with it) and as she's reaching for him, he reaches for that instead. He gets it but dooms himself. The problem with that is...well...Christmas. Will Marie save Reginald or Christmas? She can only pick one.

Marie picks Reginald, ending Christmas forever and erasing all possibility of the kingdom being relieved of his iron boot. NOW everything's your fault, Marie.

Upp, no -- Reginald was able to grab the star! And he's giving it back to her because...no one's ever done anything nice for him before! If only it were this easy IRL.

They've got just fifteen minutes left before midnight. The posse enters the Sugarplum Castle to speak to the fairy and she BETTER take the star back where it came from, and quickly. No, Phyllis Diller (who voices the fairy) says the power to restore the star belongs to Marie. And you'll never guess how. She just has to click her heels together -- I mean, throw the star toward the ceiling and believe it'll appear on the tree.

As Marie does this, everything fades to white. She's back on the couch. Her parents are here -- they made it after all. But was it all a dream?

Of course it wasn't -- you knew that. The talking food is still there, watching this unfold. And the Prince? He's human-sized now, and simply enters the room to say "Told you I'd always be with you, Marie." (Oh yeah, he clumsily threw that statement out there in the castle, but it was easy to miss.) No one questions who this stranger is that's now in their house and kissing their daughter. "OOO, I LOVE A HAPPY ENDING!" squawks the Cheech Marin nut while holding the mistletoe.

Why didn't it fit in?
The Nuttiest Nutcracker is a giant mess. The food characters have appeal, but the "serious" parts just don't work. The only bright spot is the food fight war near the beginning, but once the Prince and his fantasy land enter the picture, it becomes incredibly stupid, with plot holes the size of Reginald's swiss cheese.