YMMV / Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss

• Audience-Alienating Premise: It's a toned-down kid-friendly adaptation of one of Shakespeare's most tragic plays starring cute cartoon seal pups. It's not surprising few were interested in seeing it.
• Awesome Art: One of the few things general audiences agree is good about the film is the character animation, which is surprisingly fluid and expressive for a one-man project.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The entire scene where Romeo and Juliet are harassed by the undersea creatures who don't approve of their relationship. It's most likely an excuse for the two lead characters to face an obstacle in their romance and it's never talked about again when Romeo and Juliet escape the naysayers.
  • Kissy the Kissing Fish randomly making... Terminator 2: Judgment Day references, of all things.
  • Similarly, Friar Lawrence inexplicably rapping while taunting the Shark.
• Creator's Pet: Kissy Fish. Marginally justified by her being voiced by the creator's daughter, and the fact that there's only one creator.
• Dancing Bear: A lot of people talk about the film largely because it was animated entirely by one person.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: In the end, The Prince meets and marries another elephant seal. But considering he’s been established as a jealous, violent tyrant with no redeeming qualities who threatens to eat other characters for minor snubs, things don’t look too good for her.
• Memetic Molester: While Prince's attempts to get Juliet to marry him certainly aren't meant to be seen in a positive light, Juliet's extremely young-looking character design makes him seem even worse to many viewers.
• Narm:
  • The seals all crying at the two title character's funerals... which consists of loud seal roaring.
  • While Romeo is banished to Shark Island, Kissy decides to cheer him up by singing a little song. Which song does she choose? Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star. The same song later plays instrumentally at Romeo and Juliet's funeral.
• Narm Charm: After Juliet is seemingly dead, the Prince complains, "Ohh, women! It's always something!" Many reviewers seem to agree that this is one of the few actually funny moments of the film.
• Protection from Editors: Bobsheaux points out in his review that the entire film being written and animated by just one person wasn't necessarily a good thing, since it meant there was no-one who could notice bad ideas and keep them out of the film.
• The Scrappy:
  • Kissy the Kissing Fish for being overly cute and contributing little to the plot.
  • Mercutio is probably the most hated of all, for making all sorts of annoying jokes (some of which are racist jokes), and making the distasteful line "This party looks dead" at the titular characters' funeral.
• So Okay, It's Average: People seem to appreciate it for the Doing It for the Art aspect, but it gets called out for its obvious low budget and Strictly Formula plot.
• Special Effect Failure: While the bulk of the film is done with surprisingly good hand-drawn animation for a low-budget, indie animated feature, there are a couple parts where Nibbelink blatantly cuts corners by moving or stretching static cut-out drawings of the characters in flash, which is very jarring and embarrassingly crude looking compared to how fluid the bulk of the film's animation is. There is also the very crude CGI used in the shark chase sequence.
• Squick:
  • Both of the titular leads look like young pups, which makes it very awkward when they kiss and make bedroom eyes at each other.
  • Similarly, the very large Prince making moves on the small and young-looking Juliet gives off pedophilic undertones.
• Sweetness Aversion: Not only is it a Lighter and Softer adaptation of one of Shakespeare's darkest works, but Kissy the Kissing Fish oozes in this, given that she's voiced by the director's daughter with unscripted dialogue.
  Kissy: I don't like stinky babies! Pee-yew! (giggles) Can I be your baby? I mean, your stinky baby!
• Unfortunate Character Design: The titular leads resemble young sea lion pups, making romantic scenes a lot more uncomfortable to watch. The Values Dissonance from the original play, where Juliet is barely a teenager, doesn't help matters at all. As pointed out in Bobsheaux's review, the film would have been a lot better off had they been designed more like adult sea lions — with him using Mercutio's character design as an example — even if they wouldn't be as cute as with their official designs.

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