Duck Ugly (2003)

After serving as art director for The Nightmare Before Christmas, Cow & Chicken and a handful of Wotsits adverts, cartoonist Deane Taylor ventured into creating his own feature films for a brief period at TerraGlyph's animation studio in Dublin. His first effort at proving himself was Carnivalé, in which a group of friends wind up in a cursed Disneyland that will turn them into carnival attractions if they attempt to escape. After its premiere at Galway Film Fleadh, it failed to strike a deal with international rights holders - aside from France and Israel, it never again screened in Ireland or the UK despite Hugh Laurie and Helena Bonham Carter leading its voice cast, a North American distribution deal fell through and its unreleased video game adaptation was rescued from obscurity with greater ease than its English dub, which recently surfaced on the Internet Archive from a Chinese DVD that crops it to heck. It's a spooky, imaginative little gem despite its obvious imperfections, and certainly deserved better. Taylor was not so satisfied with how Carnivalé turned out, so one can only imagine how he and anyone involved must feel about his subsequent feature work, Duck Ugly. Co-produced with French studio Millimages once again by TerraGlyph, with a few contributions by Cartoon Saloon, Taylor and Emmanuel Klotz's (Lascars) hour-long spin on various fables and n*rsery rh*mes sees an Ugly Duckling in a 'Chosen One' situation when a mob of Little Pigs seize the land of fairy tales, as the seventh born child of any family is prophesised as the one who will rid the land of tyranny. How much do they do with this premise, you may ask? Such an unconventional and curious duck, the sworn Protector? Spoiler alert: the bare minimum. Duck Ugly went straight to DVD in France and could not secure a single medium of Irish distribution. And unlike Carnivalé's French DVD, it came with the cleanest copy of the original English dub you could possibly find, which is saying something given that the audio deteriorates for eight minutes from the 11:00 mark. The animation's lip sync does not feel language-specific, neither perfectly tailored to the English or French dialogue, and the script is threadbare even compared to Carnivalé. It's worth watching for the art direction, some glimmers of genuine absurdism and morbidity and, like all good lost and obscure media, curiosity's sake. Find both dubs here: https://archive.org/details/duck-ugly