Animation ManiaLists about films and TV shows told by the visuals-intensive medium that allows storytellers to weave fantastical legends told by unforgettable characters.
Updated October 16, 2019 55.8k votes 9.6k voters 476.8k views
Voting Rules
Vote up the films that most completely screwed up great cartoon shows.
Live-action movies based on cartoons don't have to be bad. A lot of the time, however, they suck. Animation and live-action are very different mediums, and a complex understanding of what makes something work is more essential than a literal replication of drawings. Unfortunately, if you say that to a studio executive, he or she will likely go, "Huh?"
Most of the movies on this list of awful movies based on animated shows share at least one major trait: they were made not because anyone involved gave a damn, but because the studio wanted to milk an already popular brand, even, in some cases, when said brand's popularity had peaked decades prior.
And while you may correctly point out that some of the films on this list originate with source material other than cartoons, they're included if the live-action version incorporated anything that originated in the animated version. Fair enough?
Dragonball is a cartoon so stylized that making it in live-action is a fool's errand to begin with, and the moment anybody even attempted to style Justin Chatwin's hair into a Goku 'do, it should have been a red flag.
By the time he turns into a giant were-ape at the movie's climax (yes, seriously), the accumulated red flags ought to have summoned a herd of angry bulls. The video above sums it up best.
From racial miscasting to barely coherent storytelling to bad 3D post-conversion to The Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi as an unconvincing arch-villain, The Last Airbender is like a perfect storm of badness, especially when compared to its hugely popular animated source material.
And everyone knows it except director M. Night Shyamalan, who still insists his trainwreck is and was popular with children.
Actors: Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, Nicola Peltz, Jackson Rathbone, Shaun Toub
The Scooby-Doo movies written by James Gunn are surprisingly not terrible. So of course some studio executive somewhere had to say, "We're not screwing it up enough! Fire everybody and start again with a prequel!"
At least, you can assume that's what was said. It's the only explanation for the clip above.
Actors: Frank Welker, Robbie Amell, Hayley Kiyoko, Garry Chalk, Lorena Gale
If you can't give properties the budget they deserve, maybe don't do them at all. That's the lesson behind the Jem movie, in which a hi-tech sci-fi drama is translated into a low-budget faux-musical, with holograms provided by a cheap robot that lacks all the key character traits of the cartoon show's Synergy.
Using YouTube submissions and Google Maps for scene transitions, Jem and the Holograms is embarrassingly cheap and ridiculously eager to update the material for modern audiences. Fans can only hope a reboot is not too far behind.
The Rocky and Bullwinkle movie with Robert De Niro was awkward enough. But it pales into insignificance when compared to Boris and Natasha, a Rocky and Bullwinkle movie that didn't actually have the rights to use Rocky or Bullwinkle.
It's almost like if Disney were to make a Sorcerer's Apprentice movie without Mickey Mouse, and... Oh wait. Disney actually did that, didn't they?
Actors: John Travolta, John Candy, Andrea Martin, Jim Cummings, Sally Kellerman
