United States: 2022 Título original: Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo! Directed by: Audie Harrison Screenplay: Audie Harrison, Laura Pollak, Daniel McLellan Actors (VO): Frank Welker, Gray DeLisle, Matthew Lillard Publisher: Warner Bros. Duration: 1h14 Genre: Animation DVD release date: November 16, 2022
It’s Halloween and a mysterious new enemy wants revenge on Mystery, Inc. Now they’ll have to team up with their nemesis – the evil mastermind behind all the costumes in Scooby-Doo’s story – to solve this macabre mystery. With this unpredictable new ally, Scooby and his friends will learn spooky new tricks and even don the costumes of their most famous foes to save the day on this special Halloween night…
The film
[3,5/5]
Scooby-Doo and the Halloween Mission is the thirty-seventh animated DTV based on the character of Scooby-Doo, the greedy dog created by Hanna-Barbera Studios in 1969. The first feature film Scooby Doo to be released on the video market dating back to 1998, we can assume that the franchise is still extremely profitable for the studios Warner Bros. Animation.
The visual peculiarity of Scooby-Doo and the Halloween Mission is to be the series’ first DTV adaptation Scooby-Doo and Companycreated in 2019 in order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the very first series of the franchise, broadcast on television from 1969. This series was quite remarkable in the sense that it tried to revive the visual and narrative style of the first drawings Scooby-Doo animated films in the late 60s and early 70s.
The result is very convincing, really giving the viewer the impression of being in front of an “old school” cartoon: only a few small absurd passages typical of studios Warner Bros. Animation In the 90s (Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, Freakazoid…) may betray the fact that Scooby-Doo and the Halloween Mission is actually much newer than it looks. The film therefore uses a very classic animation patina, but the whole thing is sprinkled with rather blatant touches of modernity, the most obvious of which being of course the fact that Vera, the famous bespectacled nerd of the band, either clearly represented as being homosexual.
The fact of “sexualizing” in this way an icon of animation having seen several generations of children grow up is of course likely to shock the old guard somewhat; however, it won’t really bother children. Thus, for having viewed Scooby-Doo and the Halloween Mission in the company of his seven-year-old daughter, the author of these lines can only admit that this aspect of the story did not really upset his offspring unduly. A little surprised, of course, she turned to me at one point asking me “Is she in love? “. As I answered her in the affirmative, she just decreed that after all, “it’s true that she is beautiful”. It passes cream, we tell you!
For the rest, Scooby-Doo and the Halloween Mission, it’s still pure Scooby-Doo: gossips may say that if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, and there is some truth in this assertion, and the repetition of the same narrative patterns is also one of the keys to the success of the series and of the feature films that have followed one another on DTV since the end of the 90s. As usual, there will therefore be monsters and ghosts, which will greatly frighten the band of investigators composed of Fred, Vera, Daphne, Sammy and Scooby-Doo. But although the film is largely predictable, the story still has some little surprises in store for us: we will discover, for example, that all the villains of Coolsville obtained their extravagant ghost costumes at one and the same address – once this one was put out of order. in a state of harm, our heroes find themselves on technical unemployment…
In two words as in a hundred, Scooby-Doo and the Halloween Mission is a good little film, which will delight both young Scooby-Doo fans and parents nostalgic for the franchise. Although the “mystery” of the film does not last long for adults, the animation is superb and the gags are for the most part successful, which will allow everyone to have a good time with the family!
The DVD
[4/5]
Despite the character’s popularity with several generations of animation enthusiasts, Scooby-Doo and the Halloween Mission will not go through the Blu-ray box, and will flourish on the video market only in DVD, under the colors of Warner Bros.. We will admit that said that the film has in any case no particular visual pretensions, and that in the end, it is probably just as well like that. Especially since the DVD published by Warner is in all respects excellent: the definition is exemplary, without the slightest problem of compression or other technical hiccups. On the sound side, the film is naturally offered in Dolby Digital 5.1 (VF / VO), and benefits from a dynamic and very immersive mixing, particularly remarkable during the musical sequences and / or featuring many characters on the screen.
On the side of the supplements, we will find three short adventures of Scooby-Doo, through an episode of Too cool, Scooby-Doo! entitled ” El Bandito (2017, 22 minutes) and two “classic” episodes of Scooby Doo titled ” The Masked Rider » (1976, 22 minutes) and « The Witch of Salem (1978, 22 minutes). Everything is offered to us in VOST.
We would like to give thanks to the author of this write-up for this outstanding material
United States: 2022
