User Reviews

I wish I had the chance of seeing "Little Door Gods" before making this review. Unfortunately, I only had the chance of watching "The Guardian Brothers", the English dubbed version that was released in the United States, so I won't able to make a proper comparison between them. With that being said, it still seems pretty obvious something went lost on translation.

Without being terrible as the 4Kids anime dubs (or the atrocious Saban adaptation of the 3 Digimon films) "The Guardian Brothers" has its share of problems. The first of all (and the most notorious) it's the excessive (and many times inadequate) use of songs, which in many occasions completely kill the mood of several scenes. Most of them feel randomly chosen and honestly, they were a poor attempt to add humor to a story which already had plenty of that.

The second problem is the intrusive narration, which at moments reminded me of "The Tale of Despereaux", pointing out the obvious in a couple of scenes. Ironically enough, certain parts of the movie felt a bit confusing or not properly explained, yet the narration was completely absent during those moments.

On the other side, the voice acting was a mixed bag: Most of the voices did an adequate job for each character, even if the script wasn't exactly stellar.

Dub problems aside, "The Guardian Brothers" was still a watchable family flick, with a neat animation style and some charming moments, but I wish the story fully explored the potential of its premise, and this dub could have a done a better job adapting the original version of this film for English speaking audiences.

The Guardian Brothers is a Chinese movie filled with Chinese culture and atmosphere. When I saw this movie on Netflix I was excited to watch the original Chinese version, as I believe dubbed movies can never be as good as the original. Unfortunately for me, Netflix does not have the original Chinese version, just the English dub. So I watched that instead.

I was right.

The English dub of this movie is atrocious. Not only does the animation not sync with the voices, but even worse, there is simply no emotion in said voices. The voice of Bella Thorne as the main character "Rain" is especially bad. She sounds like she was high during recording, and knowing her, she probably was. Her voice does not suit a small child, nor does she have the talent to put emotion into her voice. She sounds flat and uninterested. I didn't like any of the other voice actors either with the exception of the person who voices Shen Zu. He isn't all that great, but he all least tries and I'll acknowledge that. Edward Norton as Yu Lei was a huge disappointment as well. He is a great actor in my opinion, but in this, the emotion was just not there. He never sounded angry, happy, sad or scared enough. I know voice acting is hard, but come on, put in some effort.

AND

To add insult to injury, the music in this movie was absolutely terrible. I don't know what the music is like in the original Chinese version, I don't know if it's the same. But the music felt tone-deaf. Imagine this: the Nian has just appeared. It looks even more gruesome than you imagined. Yu Lei is on the verge of death, Rain may or may not be injured and Shen Zu is panicking. The monster roars and seems to become bigger. Yu Lei wakes up, weakened. He has to defeat the monster.

Then, as you inch closer to your tv Kungfu Fighting by Carl Douglas starts playing

What in the actual hell were they thinking? Where is the drama? Where is the sweeping action music? I know this is a movie meant for kids, but this is not Kungfu Panda, people. And even Kungfu Panda took itself more seriously some times. This film doesn't know what it wants to do. Does it want to be a children's comedy in the vein of Despicable Me? Or does it want to portray Chinese culture and tell a dark story about forgotten gods? It succeeds in neither.

The tone shifts in this film are horrible. It will shift from Rain celebrating her new soup recipe to Yu Lei dying in a temple, BAM, just like that. The comedy in this film is the worst part besides the voice acting, in my opinion though. I know humor is necessary to keep the little kids entertained and to keep the story from become too dark. It's pretty dark as it is. Bloom, the maybe love interest of Yu Lei ?, dies by fault of Yu Lei and it is never addressed + Yu Lei is a morally grey character (which is very rare in a children's film).

I think I could've enjoyed the original Chinese version of this film quite a lot more. The animation is beautiful and the story isn't half bad. The tone shifts are a bit jarring, but I would've been able to look past that if it weren't for the other major flaws of this film. There are some plotholes. Some of which are very obvious (Yu Lei aged every time he destroyed a seal. Shen Zu destroys the last seal, yet he does not age?). But it's a children's film, I could've looked past that as well.

But what we ended up with with the English version is barely watchable. Maybe it's enjoyable for small children who will enjoy anything colourful that's moving on screen. But that's it. That's the entire audience for this film.

The story of two spirit brothers was a different take on many different Chinese cultural animations out there. However, the story wasn't well delivered. In the English dub we have a young girl named Rain, voiced by Bella Thorne who sounds suspiciously older than the girl's mother, voiced by Nicole Kidman. The spirit world doesn't have a logical sense to it. Some minor characters, like Blossom, seem to have little to no significant influence on the story at all. This story has little to no depth and has all the heart of a child's picture book. The most interesting part to me was the Chinese traditions that are so different from my own and I could have gotten that much information from a Google search.