Decent film, but not hugely impressive

Rating: 5/10 (12 October 2017)

I had heard a lot about this one being good, so I decided to watch it but was rather underwhelmed. Most of all what kind of bothered me was the constant happy-cheery-jokey kind of stuff going on. I get that the target audience is young children, but I don't think that necessarily means you need to make everything so silly and cheesy. I've seen a lot of really great children's movies that were more serious (though still age-appropriate of course) and only had the occasional funny bit. Especially considering the monster theme, I did not expect this level of silly and cheesy.
And while on the topic of the monster theme, that's another thing that kind of bugged me. Maybe I'm just stuck up, I don't know, but it bothers me when creators take too much of a creative liberty with established classical characters or beings/creatures, or in some cases they just got things wrong (like the oh so typical case of calling the monster Frankenstein when that's in fact the name of the man who made him, that's a massive pet peeve of mine, and just generally making his character entirely wrong). I suppose I just prefer more old- fashioned monsters. And... Why is Quasimodo not human, and more importantly, why is he some sort of crazy fiery chef??? Speaking of which, Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame is a pretty good example of how a movie for children can still be pretty dark and serious without CONSTANT comic relief.
Overall the movie is not awful or anything, not at all, but much too goofy, over-the-top, predictable to a ridiculous extent, and not very "authentic" with its monsters. I'd say it has too much of a modern tone as well, if that makes any sense. This could have been so much better if the creators had the courage to be more unique.