Adorkable: Mambo may come off this way to some viewers. He drops the deadpan from his snark when he is nervous/freaked out and reverts to speedily tripping over his sentences, nervously grabs his tail when he and Munk first meet Ella, tries way to hard to ‘act cool’ with an embarrassing rap, and gushes over ‘doing something heroic’ with childish enthusiasm.
Awesome Moment: The seven dwarves fighting off the villains with a turret gun that shoots diamonds.
Cliché Storm: The idea of a massive crossover of fairy tale villain characters isn't without promise, but the overall execution is half-baked and pretty grim if you stop and think about it, plus the characters are old-pat for this kind of genre (the wacky mascot characters, a power-hungry villainess, a Will They or Won't They? romance, and a buffoonishly obvious Romantic False Lead).
Many points of the movie suggest the characters are constantly reliving their stories (and not in a sense where it's a consciously maintained generational cycle that has its own logic and systems in place, à la Ever After High). Keep in mind, most fairy tales feature characters in sad lives until the happy ending. This would mean, for example, Ella would go back to being her stepmother's slave shortly after marrying her prince.
This is particularly upsetting to think about, because it means Frieda would win anyway. She wouldn't be able to step on people to climb into power like she wanted, but she would pull Ella down every time she got close to happiness.
Ella: Oh my gosh, Rick! I-I was dancing with the Prince and my dress disappeared!
Rick: Okay... that's too much information, but thank you.
Just Here for Godzilla: Frieda is the only reason a lot of people watched the movie. Or at least the only reason a lot of adults let their kids watch it again.
Moral Event Horizon: Frieda changing the story so Red Riding Hood gets eaten by the wolf. (which would end up making her story more Truer to the Text when reading the original version) While she was not shown to be good before it is this action that establishes that she is completely beyond redemption.
Sequelitis: The sequel built on the bad things the first did, while simultaneously throwing out the original's redeeming qualities on half the animation budget.
