Another Christmas has passed and insatiable children from all over the world will be sobbing into their stockings after their godforsaken parents have forgotten to get them the new edition Call of Duty, Animal Crossing or whatever the latest game is. Once upon a time I was that hopeful kid, the one who desperately wanted to spend all their home time as an animated bandicoot in a race car or as an Italian plumber... in a slightly different race car.
One day my elders returned home from Makro with a non-descript plastic bag containing the game that could potentially change my life. This bag that contained the object that would define how I would waste the rest of my foreseeable weekend life. This would be the game. This day could change everything.
I peered into the shopper and my stomach dropped. A tantrum ensued. This is what was inside:
Before you accuse me of being an ungrateful brat, I need to you to realise just how fucking dreadful these supposed "games" really are. Aside from a few badly designed puzzle games and overly simple colouring pages at the end, there isn’t any actual gameplay which is really fucking pointless.
If you were expecting to have a series of fun and vaguely challenging interactions instead of piddling half an hour of their life away on some piss poor animation you’d be one hundred percent guaranteed disappointed. No testing out your virtual skateboarding skills like in Tony Hawks Underground 2, no pretending to live an immensely exaggerated life of an adventurous ant like in the Bugs Life game, nothing. Chess would be more entertaining.
Dingo Pictures’ whole schtick is to essentially suck the life and soul from every Disney animation in order to trick unsuspecting parents into getting their kids what they assume to be genuine merchandise instead of the bargain bin monstrosities that they truly are. Obviously my edition of Nice Cats was a total rip off of the classic Aristocats film where a bunch of cats get abandoned by a bad guy so that he can reap the rewards of the fortune they inherit. The plot of the dupe cartoon is presumably something to do with a rich ladies kittens running away whilst they’re on holiday but to be honest it makes little to no sense so I can’t really be sure.
One of the main kitten characters - Lucy - is voiced by a fairly terrible unnamed actress that features in pretty much every single one of Dingo Picture’s productions. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cheapskates got her to record lines for every single animation in one go purely to cut costs because I doubt she even rehearsed any of the lines.
Characters are duplicated multiple times across many films and our young Lucy appears again in the unsurprisingly terrible Dalmatians 3. Aladdin was even re-used in his own imitation, poor guy.
You could probably forgive the replications if it was animated well but even that falls further than short as some bodily movements don’t even make physical sense. In Animal Soccer World, a particularly questionable rip of multiple kids’ motion pictures, a team of wild cats are challenged by a group of dogs to a football match. Clearly this is a little farfetched as animals don’t tend to understand the rules of sport but even worse is the thought of all these animals running around on their hind legs.
There’s a particularly jokes moment where the black panther character. Basic biology clearly doesn’t click well with Dingo because some herbivorous species in Dinosaur Adventure resort to cannibalism after an eruption leaves them without plants. Then again, there’s a T-Rex with a button nose and everything seems to be drawn in crayon so anything is possible.
The script leaves a lot to be desired as most of it doesn’t make sense, if there were literally any good attributes of these films we’d probably put it down to bad translation seeing as they’e originally made in German but that’s probably not the case at all. Notable lines such as “your father the Black Panther is your father” and “can you image India?” will forever haunt my nightmares.
My original copy of Nice Cats sits and gathers dust on the bookshelf in my living room, only ever being disturbed from it’s hiding place when nosy guests rifle through my belongings and wondering “what the fuck is that?” after the awful kitten illustrations catch their eye. Hopefully now that writing this is over I can finally put Dingo Pictures to rest and the next time you get a fairly terrible gift, just be grateful that it wasn't this.
