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YMMV / Bolívar, el Héroe

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  • Audience-Alienating Premise: To begin with, the film takes many artistic licenses with the story of Simon Bolívar, which for many people is disrespectful. The poor animation (which attempts to invoke an Animesque style) and the numerous exaggerated cliches can also be quite alienating to anime fans.
  • Bile Fascination: The movie is often included in many "Top 10 Worst Animated Movies" videos in Spanish frequently, which has drawn the attention of many people who go mainly to see if the movie is as bad as people say.
  • Cliché Storm: This film tries too hard to ride on the fame of Shōnen anime, to the point of having a lot of clichés: divided screens, a rival, over-the-top hairstyles, and weird sword approaches and cuts.
  • Cult Classic: The fact that this was a lost film for 12 years, its So Bad, It's Good reputation, and being one of the very few Animesque works produced in Latin America, has gained it this status.
  • Fan Nickname: “Tatsumi” for Simon Rodriguez and “Vegeta Gordo/Fat Vegeta” for Rourke because of their resemblances to those characters.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Bolívar's wife, Maria Teresa, looks a lot like Lucina, as hilariously shown here.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • Given the movie's infamous anime artstyle and following its rediscovery in 2015, parodies of it have become very common amongst the Latin American anime community, especially those where it's mixed with JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
    • "¡[X], salve usted la patria!" Explanation 
  • Mis-blamed: A lot of the flak Guillermo Rincón has taken ever since the release, never acknowledged that he only made the basic premise, while everything else was done by Nixon Aguilera and Diego Zahec.
  • Narm: Given the utterly atrocious animation and abysmal storytelling, it needs its own page.
  • Romantic Plot Tumor: The romance of Rosa and Américo was felt as filler and bordered on marginalizing Bolívar's story.
  • So Bad, It's Good: The character designs and the effects are regarded as ridiculous, as is the writing, but they make this film funny.
  • Special Effects Failure:
    • The cannonballs, the shootings (especially the ones with pistols), the whippings and other attacks are poorly done, failing to look realistic at all or at least believable.
    • The storm at sea when Bolivar travels to Spain has some of the fakest CGI water and tornado you'll ever see in an animated feature.
    • Colonel Rondón is clearly just a recolored Bolivar.
  • Tear Jerker: While the awful animation and artstyle do ruin them quite a bit, both Rourke’s death and Bolivar mourning Americo are actually quite emotionally effective, mostly thanks to the music and the dub actors acting their hearts out.
  • Took the Bad Film Seriously: The Mexican dub actors all give their best efforts in an otherwise appalling movie.
  • Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The art style is reminiscent of those "How to Draw Manga" books from the early 2000s, which, combined with the choppy and stiff animation, ends being very awkward-looking.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Bolívar as a kid, since he is introduced as the first attacking Tiránico and has a bratty personality, which diminishes the sensation that Tiránico is a jerk.
  • Values Dissonance: Sort of. The movie features a lot of characters, including Simon Bolivar, referring to Americo and the other slaves as “negros.” If this took place in the United States, it’s pretty clear they’d be saying the N-word, but since Spanish doesn’t really have an equivalent to it (“negro” is literally just “black” and a still-accepted way to refer to African-Americans) it doesn’t really come across as a slur but it can be still a bit headscratching to hear it being used so constantly in a movie aimed at kids.
  • What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: This animated film is intended for kids, but there are amounts of heavy violence.


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