The Sinbad Movie You (Probably) Never Watched
I owe a lot of my early creative discoveries to my lovely mother who would occasionally bring me home little surprises, be it beloved video games or niche European animated films in the clearance section. There was no rhyme or reason to what she would bring home each day, I think the colorful and artistic CD covers motivated her more than anything else. This is how I discovered many media classics like Spyro, Kingdom Hearts, Sly Cooper, Spirited Away, Daria, but also many lesser known gems like War of the Birds (which to this day I think is one of the darkest animated films aimed at a younger audience). It wasn’t always a home run, however.
Sometimes she would bring DVDs and CDs that were utterly incomprehensible, borderline lost media with wacky plot and art. The kind of stuff that wakes you up at night 15 years later while you wonder whether what you actually saw was real or a figment of your childish imagination. This all sets the stage for one of my weirdest, most bizarre childhood memories. For a long time I actually couldn’t even find evidence that this existed, and nobody I talked to had ever heard or seen the film in question.
Without further ado, I present to you…
The image you’re seeing above is the poster for the 2000 animated feature-length film called “Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists” (and that’s the good poster. I could’ve gone with this one). But wait, you might think, there is a Sinbad film out there and it definitely didn’t look like this, and you wouldn’t be wrong. In 2003 DreamWorks released their own version of the Sinbad tale and while it wasn’t a total commercial success, it was much more beloved and successful than the version we’ll be discussing today.
On paper, “Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists” had everything to become a huge commercial success. The film had a great cast with talented actors and voice actresses like Jennifer Hale, Mark Hamill and Leonard Nimoy, among others. The budget for Sinbad was also quite big: a whooping $30 million (that’s in 2000) and would be one of the first animated films to fully use motion capture technology. It was a big and ambitious project, and yet it failed tremendously. With its talented cast, big ambitions and a bigger budget, the film only generated about $29,000 in box office sales. It made about $6,000 on its opening week.
So what went wrong?
It’s complicated, and a bit hard to dissect. Besides the most basic information, there’s barely anything else about the film online. No ads, no interviews, no ironic YouTube reviews. I am convinced that this is partly due to shame and a desire to forget this ever happened by the parties involved in the creation of the movie and also partly because only around 10 people saw this.
For this reason, I will be basing most of my article on my own recollections of the movie. I also managed to get my hands on a copy of Sinbad and re-watched it all the way through. After re-watching the film again so many years later, I am not quite so sure it was worth it all for an article that no one will read as it has somehow managed to be worse than I remember. If you really want to go down the rabbit hole with me, you can watch the entire thing on YouTube.
The setting of Sinbad is partly grounded in its Arabic origins and partly an amalgamation of fantasy and alien tropes. One of our protagonists — Princess Serena — lives on an island that looks vaguely Middle Eastern and partly like a HC Andersen fever dream. The island is ruled by a benevolent king and they all live in a perfect, utopian society. The End.
Well, not quite.
Free healthcare and an essentially perfect life doesn’t interest Princess Serena. See, she wants adventure. So when she meets a poor old stranded stranger on the beach, she has to rescue him and invite him to her father’s castle. The stranger seems weird; his skin is too unnatural and his hair can only be described as something between red cabbage and expired sardines — but those are all minor flaws Serena can ignore, especially when she sees his chest full of totally unsuspicious, mystery magical potions.
Serena’s trusting nature ends up being her downfall as her father gets tricked into drinking one of the magical potions. Which triggers an unholy Freaky Friday-like transformation as the red cabbage stranger(named Baraka) switches bodies with King Chandra. With her real father in jail and Baraka as the king, the princess flees in search of someone to help her.
Enter stage: somehow one of the most normal looking characters in this film — Sinbad.
Together they must traverse a dangerous journey to find her father’s curse, defeat the evil wizard Baraka and switch his body back. The rest you will have to watch for yourself if you’re curious, because the journey you’ll embark on is truly beyond words.
The characters constantly glitch in and out of their environment, the eyes look incredibly lifeless and the movements are painfully stiff. Everything about the movie instills in you a feeling of extreme unease and the uncanny valley effect is in full force. At times the settings switch at dizzying speeds: from fighting and decapitating Doom-like monsters to being trapped by underwater Alien-like contraptions that feel too H.R. Giger-esque for a children’s movie. There’s also underwater fish-aliens, because why not? The underwater scenes were actually so unsettling and bizarre that I am sure they partially influenced my thalassophobia.
Oh and there’s also this character:
At the end of the day, I think Sinbad failed because it had close to no PR, barely no advertising, and it was just hard to look at the film. I mean, how many of you knew Mark Hamill was in this? Or that it’s the first feature-length computer animation that was done solely with motion capture technology? It was trying to master a technology that was fairly novel at the time, and being a fairly new (and I presume inexperienced) team, this wasn’t an easy task. It dreamed too big.
I want it to be clear that I am not writing this article with an intent to hate on the film. On the contrary, I have watched it so much as a child that I remembered all the scenes and even some dialogue before it happened — people don’t lie when they say everything looks better when you’re a child. Looking back on the film, it’s a painful watch (and even as a kid some scenes made me feel uneasy and scared), everything is disjointed and feels too much like a mix between Lovecraftian horror and a bad 90’s comedy.
That said, I can’t ignore the sheer ambition the movie had; it wanted to use novel technology and defy all tropes. It shot too high for the stars, and it flopped back embarrassingly on its belly. But I can’t hate it. This is a bad film but I liked it as a child.
The concept, animation, characters, everything was so utterly bizarre and alien to me that I could not keep myself from rewatching it. It set out to do what all children’s animation intend to at their core: entertain, and it entertained me. For all I’m concerned, the film was a success to 6 year old me, even if no one else in the world happens to like it.
The way I see it now? It’s a funny trip down memory lane that truly embodies what the uncanny valley is. It’s like looking at absurdist art after consuming your body weight in drugs. It’s objectively bad but I can’t hate it, I see and appreciate the love and naive ambition behind this work.
I wish more people watched this, I wish there were more video reviews for the film on YouTube, I wish I could share the absurd hilarity that is “Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists” with everyone.
Here is a still of Serena and Sinbad riding on a flying jellyfish.
