YMMV / Twice Upon a Time

• Awesome Art: The backlit paper cutout animation technique is really pushed to its limits in this film. Some shots even manage to recreate traditional animation techniques, such as smears and squash-and-stretch.
• Awesome Music: The whole soundtrack is a nice little hidden gem of 80s movie music, both with Dawn Atkinson & Ken Melville Simmons-drums-and-orchestra score and the pop songs, especially Bruce Hornsby's "Heartbreak Town" and Maureen McDonald's title theme (co-written by her more famous brother Michael) which bookend the movie. Sadly, the budget and box office draw was such that no soundtrack album was ever released, though a few promo singles have been uploaded to the internet so those who desperately need the songs in portable form aren't just stuck with rips from the movie.
• Cult Classic: An especially small one, since not only did it barely have a theatrical release, but only a slightly better home video release. Still, its unique visual style and surreal plot were enough to stick with people who caught it in its few TV airings on HBO and especially Cartoon Network's "Cartoon Theater" in the late 90s. Turner Classic Movies thought enough of it to air it in February 2015 as part of its TCM Underground block, with the film finally getting a proper DVD release (with a DVD Commentary and everything!) later that same year through Warner Archive.
• Fan Nickname: The PG cut of the movie is sometimes referred to as the PG-13 cut by fans, ^note At the time a PG rating was the equivalent of what PG-13 is to modern viewers. The latter wouldn't be introduced until later in the 80's although some bootlegs will call it the R-rated cut as well.
• Fanon: Fraggle Rock fans who saw the film during its HBO run thought the middle-aged man at the conclusion buying a balloon was Doc (Gerry Parkes).
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • During the character introduction scene in the opening, Ibor fiddles with his TV antennas which causes a clip of The Muppet Show to appear on his screen. Decades later, both the Muppets and the film's co-producer would end up being acquired by Disney.
  • Bosch runs a business devoted to capturing and distilling screams of terror.
    • Also, there's a rat character named Ratatooie. Do we even need to say it? (Bonus points because Pixar was founded by former Lucasfilm employees)
  • Ralph is a shape-shifting dog-like creature with a taller human companion.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • It's impossible not to smile when said man buys the balloon and it turns yellow.
  • The end credits depict the voice actors interacting with their characters.
• Nightmare Fuel: When the nightmare bomb goes off, engulfing Mum and Ralph inside it, the two are threatened by killer office supplies.
• Once Original, Now Common: Deconstructions of fairy tales, pop culture references and Cluster F Bombs were unknown to American animated films outside of Ralph Bakshi's output in 1983.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • A 19 year old David Fincher was special-effects photographer. His expertise with a Mitchell camera earned him the job.
  • 30 year old Henry Selick was the sequence director for the film.
  • This was also one of Lorenzo Music's first cartoon voiceover roles before he'd become better known as the voice of Garfield. Prior to this, he'd mainly worked as a writer while occasionally appearing in the shows he wrote (most notably, Carlton the doorman), and while the first Garfield special, Here Comes Garfield, came out before this film, it'd be a few years before Garfield and Friends would eclipse the original comic strip's popularity and make Music's voice inseparable from the character (humorously enough, Cartoon Network began airing reruns of Garfield shortly after rerunning this film, being one of the few stations to do either).
• Ugly Cute: Ratatooie.
• Values Dissonance: After 9/11 and a few other high-profile acts of domestic terrorist bombings occurring around the world in the 2000 and 2010s, Botch's plan to plant bombs throughout the real world feels much too scary for a family film.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: A rather convoluted example, but ultimately why the movie was a flop. It was a family movie, as the filmmakers had been commissioned to do, but the studio somehow thought it would play well with college audiences. After all of the college-aged test screenings flopped, co-writer Bill Couturié panicked and hastily re-cut the dialogue to include new, more profane lines from the actors to appeal to an older audience. Unfortunately, theater chains were not informed of these last-minute changes and put it on a double-bill with the (slightly) more family friendly The Secret of NIMH. Parents were understandably pissed and the film was quickly pulled from theaters. John Korty, who had already moved onto another project and was unaware of all of this, was livid and threatened to sue the studio if they released the film anywhere without his consent.

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