Mockbuster Wiki
Register
Advertisement

Vídeo Brinquedo (Toyland Video) is a Brazilian company that produces direct-to-video animated Z movies. The company has been accused by reviewers of creative media of distributing films with concepts blatantly plagiarized from films by Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks, 20th Century Fox, Blue Sky Studios , Hasbro and Sony Animation. It has been widely regarded as one of the worst animation companies in history, producing some of the most hated animated movies of all time. Though, despite extreme hatred, that brought the company to infamy, Video Brinquedo still continues to produce animation, though it consists on educational YouTube animations.[1][2]

History

Early years

The earliest use of the Vídeo Brinquedo name goes back to 2004[3], meaning that the studio was probably founded in that year. They were a budget DVD distributor that did some collaborations with Spot Films,[4] an American distributor from Los Angeles. While no real connection is clear, it's most likely that Vídeo Brinquedo started as a Brazilian subsidiary for Spot Films before becoming their own thing.

Film production

While they started as a distributor of foreign series and films, they also delved into film production, with their earliest works being modern adaptations of fairytales such as Pinocchio or Rapunzel.

However they wouldn't see a lot of success until the summer of 2006 when they made their first mockbuster Os Carrinhos em: A Grande Corrida, loosely inspired by Pixar's at the time new film Cars. It soon became one of Vídeo Brinquedo's most sold films on DVD, eventually spawning merchandise, a videogame and a show. After this they started to use a similar strategy for most of their productions, with notorious examples such as Ratatoing and Ursinho Da Pesada. Most of their films were short, sometimes not even lasting 40 minutes.

They also made a few TV shows which were released on DVD as compilation movies, with the most famous example being the Os Carrinhos series.

Rebranding

At some point after 2014, Vídeo Brinquedo had stopped DVD production and switched to solely making content on their YouTube channel, and presumably in 2016 they rebranded to Crianças Inteligentes[5], though their YouTube channel was still called Vídeo Brinquedo until 2021. While they don't make films anymore, most of their old material has been uploaded to their official YouTube channel and is also available to watch in streaming services such as Prime Video.

List of mockbusters

Reception

Vídeo Brinquedo's films have been extremely negatively reviewed. Marco Aurélio Canônico of Folha de S. Paulo described the Little Cars series as a copy of the Pixar film Cars, and likewise Ratatoing of Ratatouille. He discussed whether lawsuits from Pixar would appear. The Brazilian Ministry of Culture posted Marco Aurélio Canônico's article on its website.

Erik Henriksen, a reporter from The Portland Mercury, criticized Vídeo Brinquedo of being "the laziest/cheapest movie studio of all time" due to similarities between Ratatoing and Ratatouille, The Little Cars and Cars, and Gladiformers and Transformers.

One reviewer on Toon Zone, in his review of Ratatoing, said: "if you ate a copy of the worst cartoon you could think of, you'd still probably crap something better than Ratatoing", and went on to bemoan the incredibly poor animation, calling the movie as a whole "a senseless waste of raw materials" and "a waste of time, energy and effort for all parties concerned." Other criticisms of Video Bringuedo include the very poor 3D animation and the voices in the movies being out of sync due to the films originally being dubbed in Portugese and then being redubbed into English very poorly.

See also

References

Advertisement