Swan Princess 7: Royally Undercover (2017)

“After mysterious visitors arrive in the Kingdom, Princess Alise, Lucas and their friends go undercover on a secret spy adventure to see if they can be trusted. They will need all of their superior detective skills as well as some super cool gadgets to solve the royal mystery and save the Kingdom.”

– Anonymous, IMDB.

The Swan Princess: Royally Undercover was announced via Facebook as the seventh installment of the franchise. The film was released direct-to-video in March 2017. One review on Rotten Tomatoes reads “This is the seventh film in The Swan Princess franchise, but it clearly hasn’t reached midnight yet thanks to the charming newest entry in the series.” An eighth film was announced shortly after the release of Royally Undercover, and was released in 2018.

Some thoughts from me (Potential spoilers below)…
So as mentioned in my post about Swan Princess 6, I was worried that the producers had caught onto how they were gaining notoriety for how terrible their sequels are, and that Swan Princess 6 was a deliberate attempt to make a bad film. I was very relieved to see that Swan Princess 7 returns things to that particular brand of ‘dumb, but entertaining’ that I now come to expect from the Swan Princess series.

What makes Swan Princess 7 particularly great, if I have to spell it out for you, is the weird mish-mash of a medieval world where actual magic exists, with a kid friendly spy/espionage plot. One thing that has popped up in the CGI sequels is the introduction of technology that doesn’t fit with the time period. As you might expect, that’s in full spades in Swan Princess 7. After all, you can’t have a spy movie without spy gadgets.

Interestingly, Swan Princess 7 also marks the spot where the series starts expecting you to remember previously introduced characters. Alise’s friend Lucas was first introduced in Swan Princess 6, and Number 9 (The cat on the DVD cover), was introduced in Swan Princess 5. So if this somehow is your first look into the world of the Swan Princess sequels, you are gonna need to do some catch-up.

Swan Princess 7 actually has a somewhat cohesive plot. While it’s not as crazy as Swan Princess 5 (which, I’ll remind you, was the sequel that featured the warrior race of flying squirrels), my viewing group really enjoyed this one. I think because the plot was actually pretty straight-forward it meant that everyone could focus on all the other weirdness in the movie… the gadgets, the faux mystery, and of course, the terrible songs… without losing track of where the story is. While it’s sometimes really fun to be completely baffled with a movie, other times it’s nice to be able to follow along without it being a headache.

So my recommendation is, definitely check this one out! Especially if you are planning on looking at Swan Princess 8, which really expects you to be familiar with the events of Swan Princess 7.

References

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