Fresh and Exciting

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The movie starts with some over the top narration..I think Dryfus could have turned it down a few notches along with his evil looking snowman certainly not Burl Ives. The animation is like watching the WII bowling team...It is terrible. But I think the big crime here is the story line..It moves at the speed of snail and is way to long. This movie could have easily been cut down to 50 minutes.All that said I was wondering if anyone caught the overtones. the female pig who needs a slot. The Zsa Zsa Gabor sexpot queen and Rudolf telling his girl friend she needs to earn her wings...In all it's a slow moving, poorly animated movie that is way to long and is just odd to watch. It doesn't work even with the big names associated with the film.

Okay... where to start...I saw this on TV today, expecting the original Rudolph toon from the '60s. Quickly found out this wasn't the same thing.The first thing that's apparent is that this is not a Rankins-Bass production; that production house's distinctive magic is definitely missing. However, this film does one thing that the official Rankins-Bass sequels ("Rudolph's Shiny New Year" and "Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July") failed to do: bring back the characters we know and love. Hermie and Yukon Cornelius are finally back.It's not clear exactly when the story is supposed to take place, except that clearly some amount of time has passed since Christmastown last graced the small screen. Yet for that, Rudolph and Clarice are now pictured as their younger selves instead of the adult versions seen in the latter half of the first film. However, Rankins-Bass's own sequels did pretty much the same thing, so I don't hold that against this newcomer.As for the story itself... the way it's introduced is a little kiddie even by 50s-60s standards, but outside of that it's handled pretty well. You can see where the plot is heading from a mile off, but I suppose the young audience these films target might not connect the dots right away... Anyway, it's a heartfelt story with a message of the same quality.The graphics are primitive by today's standards and maybe even by the standards of 2001 when the film was produced. You get used to it quick enough, and when it comes down to it they don't need too much horsepower to recreate the simple designs of the original puppets. One gripe I have is that the reindeer's fur has no texture. It's just a solid color. My main problem with the graphics is how much more work was put into those of the new characters than those of the old. Queen Camila is a prime example of this. Besides that, the style of the new characters is vastly different from that of the old. It's almost as though they were from two completely different films.The voice acting is the best thing this toon has going for it. The original characters' new voice actors imitated their predecessors to an amazing degree of accuracy. Cornelius's voice gets a little bit too high as the movie goes on... but is still more intact than you'd think. It's forgivable considering that Cornelius's voice with its raspy, grunty qualities probably destroys the vocal chords of whoever attempts it much like the voice of Yosemite Sam. Clarice sounds almost nothing like her previous incarnation, but one does have to consider that her original voice was probably the actress's natural timbre as opposed to Yukon, Hermey and Santa's voices which were effected to serve the character. As such her voice is not as easy to imitate. Hermey, Rudolph, Santa and the original Misfit Toys are spot-on. The elf foreman and King Moonracer are close enough (though the latter is a bit awkward). As for the new voices, not much can be said except that they all pretty much fit the character they were assigned to well enough. My only gripe here is that for the Toy Taker they opted to use a different actor for the character's singing, a common practice which I've never been too fond of.As for the new characters themselves... Camila feels a bit unneeded at first but is tolerable (except for one particular part of her dance routine), though most would probably disagree with me on that. The new misfit toys have pretty much no point, except for the kite who has brief importance.And then... the songs. The song for the Island of Misfit Toys is about as pleasant to listen to as construction machines in the morning when you're trying to sleep. I like all the other songs though. They're not masterpieces and, let's face it, forgettable. Likable but not memorable. The best one would probably be the Toy Taker's song.In summary... The effort alone is worthy of an A. They really tried hard to stay true to the original, and for trying to do that more than forty years later they did about as good as it would ever be possible for anyone to do. The new stuff clashed with the old in some places but still blended enough. It's still a nice toon to watch with the family. It's also a good source of laughs for those who are willing to take the missed marks with a sense of humor. It's not in my list of favorite films by any stretch, but I'll still enjoy watching it around Christmas time in the years to come. I give it a C, which is more than I can give some other movies' sequels.

This is an abomination to the entire film industry and a disgrace and insult to the original 1964 classic. The animation looks like some amateur bought a 'CGI For Dummies' book and made it on their home computer. Like other users remarked there is no texture to the images, the graphics look like something out of a cheap children's video game, in which the paper thin plot would have been more suitable for. Gosh, the 30 second AFLAC commercial that spoofed Rudolph had more production value than this 90 minutes of gutter trash! This had so much potential to be a decent sequel but greed, as always in modern movie making, killed it with a slapped together rush job all for the sake of capitalizing off the Rudolph franchise and the integrity of the original!

While this special will never measure up to the beloved "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" (can any special do that??) - it is fun to watch, especially if you are a fan of the original. Its nice to see all the characters from the Rankin/Bass classic come back and you can tell that whoever made this film paid a lot of attention to the original. This is much more than I can say for the other "Rudolph" film that came out a few years before this one or the abysmal "Frosty Returns"! The songs are hit-or-miss, some are pretty bad and some are quite good (for example the one that the Hippo sings). It also has a lot of heart and does capture the spirit of Romeo Mueller's heartwarming writing. The only major complaint I have is that this should really have been done in stop-motion puppet animation instead of cheap computer-animation which already looks dated only a few years after its release. I'm sure it would have garnered a much better response if it had been done in the same style of animation as its predecessor.