Popular reviews

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  Review by Lizzie Knotneck ★★★★★

  watched on a long bus ride that has a dvd player while listening to the residents the whole time lmao

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  Review by Michael Shawn ★★★½

  A supremely strange animated film, but then most were in the 1960s & '70s. Strange and dark. You think you or your kids were traumatized by Mufasa's murder? Try an ENTIRE FAMILY OF HIPPOS, leaving behind the titular orphan. There's quite a bit here that frames that G rating as adults asleep at the wheel. But man, oh man, that animation! I've never seen another film in this overall style. It's full of stylized forms with vibrant, psychedelic colors, and every frame looks like a page from a picture book. And it's the animation that is really its saving grace. Because it's still a problematic film. Besides being too dark for the kiddies, it has quite a few instances of racial…

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  Review by Kyle O

  HUGO THE HIPPO is unlike most animated movies out there. A breed of its own, perhaps? One of the few American animated pictures to be made behind the Iron Curtain, HUGO THE HIPPO defies logic, inside its bonkers narrative and outside of it, if that makes any sense. Heck, that contrived description makes more sense than most of what happens in the movie itself. A movie that got made in Hungary because the producers bribed their government into letting them ship their project over there, a movie funded by a French cosmetics company, and a movie that somehow involved Roger Moore of James Bond fame. Oh, did I mention the soundtrack consists of songs by Jimmy and Marie Osmond, and…

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  Review by Saturnome 🦆

  Les hongrois l'ont vraiment l'affaire avec les dessins animés psychédéliques. Les connaisseurs savent pour Feherlofia, mais il y a d'autres perles comme Habfurdo ou Janos Vitez, et à ça s'ajoute Hugo a Vizilo. C'est le genre de truc qui se regarde juste pour son visuel, quelque part entre une pochette d'album stoner ben fuzzé des 70s et un vieux livre éducatif mais épeurant pour enfants approuvé par un ministère de l'éducation quelconque. Je n'arrive pas à me décider si ce film est beau ou horriblement moche, mais c'est probablement vrai dans les deux cas. En tout cas, à un moment je n'était plus capable de lire les sous-titres tellement il se passait des choses à l'écran. Ça commence avec un…

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  Review by Anna Frohling ★★

  Kinda drags in the middle, but theres killer celery and nazi sharks!

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  Review by James McKee ★★★★★ 1

  Not all animated films need to follow the standards set by Laika, Disney, Pixar, Aardman and Ghibli to be great
  There are times an animated film can be great on it's own terms like Moomins on the Riviera and Mark Osborne's The Little Prince for example

  Hugo The Hippo is a film is a film i like to call "So campy, It's great"
  There are elements of camp like the OST comprising of tunes mostly sung by Jimmy Osmond, Marie Osmond and Burl Ives and of course, Paul Lynde's recognizably camp voice being used as the voice of the film's evil vizier, Aban-Khan
  but however what make the film stands out is the animation and the visuals itself

  Sure, The…

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  Review by frankie ★★★

  Killer soundtrack in this, the animation is awesome and kinda trippy. Of course it's a movie from it's time and has some questionable characters. I think this was a bit too long, especially for a kids film. However I really liked the style!

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  Review by G. Smalley ★★★★

  The Sultan of Zanzibar kidnaps a herd of hippopotami to protect his harbor from sharks, but after the beasts eat the town's crops, the vizier (voiced by Paul Lynde!) plots hippo genocide. With its dream sequences (multi-eyed potato monoliths) and bizarre color schemes, it's mild psychedelia in the YELLOW SUBMARINE vein, more proof of the overlapping demographic between children and potheads.

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  Review by Kevin McCormick ★★★★ 1

  Rewatching was necessary just to reassure myself that the dramatic courtroom sequence where lisping Arab Vizier Paul Lynde pursues a plucky indigenous South African tot and his magical hippo pal through a fourth-dimensional netherworld, deploying murderous fruit assassins armed with tomato bombs, radish grenades and hollow-point carrot rounds was not a dream I had after drinking an entire gallon of cough syrup.

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  Review by Xennui ★★★★

  This Hungarian film tells a story about hippos in Zanzibar, injected with an eye-dropper full of LSD. The images are frequently stunning, and some sequences very impressive. There are some issues with the pacing and writing, not to mention reliance on broad cultural stereotypes, but I'd venture to say it has its heart in the right place. Hugo the Hippo is certainly floating in the wake of Yellow Submarine, but also brought to mind Tezuka Osamu's Cleopatra and Yokoo Tadanori's pop stylings too.

  In terms of the message, it's one that I support wholeheartedly, relayed in a fairly simple way. It seems to be about how humans depend on animal labour but fail to recognise or reward them adequately. A…

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  Review by buscemibabe232 ★★★

  The director being like oh you know who we should cast as this Arabic person? PAUL LYNDE

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  Review by Ethan99 ★★

  Have you ever seen a film that makes you say "not every movie has to be 90/120 minutes"?

  HUGO THE HIPPO, I think, is practically the textbook definition of this. It starts out good, but the longer it goes, the more bored I get. It's actually comparable to most pre-Renaissance Disney movies, where they pad out the runtime with over-extended sequences of animation.

  Now, with those aforementioned Disney movies, they had somewhat (key word being "somewhat") of an excuse to be slow. They were some of the first full-length animated features ever made, so naturally, they're gonna have some of that "first movie syndrome" sprinkled in. HUGO THE HIPPO, on the other hand, has no excuse. This came out fourteen…