It Came From The Video Store - Sealed With A Kiss

Tired of trips to crowded the­aters full of noisy kids and over­priced food? Had your fill of vapid real­ity shows on TV? Won­der­ing what to stock your Net­flix queue with? Every week, Robert Saucedo’s “It Came From the Video Store” will point you in the direc­tion of a movie that is worth see­ing and should be avail­able in a video store near you.

Imag­ine if you will, a car­toon ver­sion of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Now imag­ine that instead of young teenagers falling in love before they meet a tragic end, you have a story about young seals in love. Now image that, snug­gled amidst the tragedy of Shakespeare’s play, you have the worst puns, pratfall-​based com­edy and bizarre half-​assed musi­cal num­bers this side of William Shat­ner on Prozac.

There’s really no need to imag­ine, because Phil Nibbe­link has cre­ated (appar­ently single-​handedly) such a movie. Romeo And Juliet: Sealed With A Kiss trans­lates a sur­pris­ingly large amount of Shakespeare’s clas­sic play, about two star-​crossed lovers, into a cheesy, cell-​animated movie about seals. Romeo, a brown seal, has fallen for Juliet, a white seal. Torn apart by their seal races’ hatred for each other and the schem­ing unwanted romances of a jeal­ous ele­phant seal (appar­ently the prince of the ocean), Romeo and Juliet strive to find a way to be together — at all costs.

A lit­er­ally last-​minute deus ex machina happy end­ing saves this film from being one of the most awk­ward children’s movies ever made. Imag­ine hav­ing to explain to your tod­dler why Romeo and Juliet killed each other because they couldn’t be together.

Just because the film ends on a happy note, though, doesn’t mean that there still plenty of pretty trau­matic moments in the film. There are still plenty of appar­ent deaths to trau­ma­tize your lit­tle ones. And if the seem­ingly tragic end of cute and cud­dly seals isn’t enough to set your child off on a cry­ing fit, there are the absolutely hor­ri­ble music num­bers sprin­kled through­out the film.

There are slow, spo­ken word doo-​ops, bizarre quasi-​raps, Shatner-​esque Sina­tra impres­sions and a com­pletely inap­pro­pri­ate and out-​of-​place ren­di­tion of “Twin­kle Twin­kle Lit­tle Star.”

Speak­ing of inap­pro­pri­ate, the story intro­duces a char­ac­ter named Kissy the Kiss­ing Fish that serves as the film’s proxy for any annoy­ing chil­dren you might be lack­ing while watch­ing the film. Much like real chil­dren do dur­ing movies, Kissy the Kiss­ing Fish fre­quently makes unwanted ear-​grating obser­va­tions about the film’s plot — seem­ingly to help chil­dren under­stand some of the nuances about Shakespeare’s story. Appar­ently, the fish is voiced by the writer/director/animator’s daugh­ter so I guess I can under­stand why she gets so much screen time. It doesn’t make the char­ac­ter any eas­ier to stand, though.

Watch­ing the film, I was struck by two things: a mor­bid curios­ity about whether or not the film­maker was actu­ally going to end the movie with the two seals killing them­selves and the obser­va­tion that the movie was really about inter­ra­cial dat­ing. Instead of just hav­ing the main char­ac­ters’ romance frowned upon by fam­ily mem­bers, the film­maker chose to have all the ocean’s res­i­dents dis­gusted by the idea of the two seals, one brown and one white, dat­ing. As one who is strongly against intol­er­ance how­ever below the sea level it may be, I can only hope for the best for my new seal friends as they ven­ture out in their jour­ney of color-​blind love.

Romeo And Juliet: Sealed With A Kiss still sucked though.

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When not watch­ing movies he is clearly not the intended audi­ence for, Robert Saucedo is an occa­sional free­lance writer whose work appears reg­u­larly in the Bryan/​College Sta­tion Eagle, Inside Pulse — Movies, and is now avail­able in binary code for you nerds. Visit him on the web and read about his “Year of Bad Movies” at The Car­ry­ing On of a Way­ward Son.