“When one man seeks to control the four elements using living crystals it’s down to one heroine to keep that from happening with the help of old and new friends.”
– Anonymous, IMDB.
The Legend of Atlantis is brought to us by Golden Films and Goodtimes Entertainment. The film features Golden Films voice actor Debi Derryberry, who has appeared in many of Golden Films’ animated movies. Debi Derryberry got her start in voice acting in the 1986 English dub of Castle in the Sky, in which she voiced Young Sheeta.
Some thoughts from me (Potential spoilers below)…
There’s always a bit of a quality bump when Golden Films and Goodtimes team up together. The animation isn’t great, but it’s a fair bit better than Golden Films’ solo outings. Honestly the entire thing feels a bit more ambitious than their usual fair. It feels like some decent effort went into this one, which I think is partially due to them attempting to create an original story. That said, we still can see some of Golden Films’ trademark reuse of animation (Which in this movies case, can sometimes cause confusion as it’s not really obvious when it’s a flashback vs. when they’re just reusing assets).
As a side note, this film came out in 2004, while Disney’s Atlantis came out in 2001, so I’m hesitant to draw any immediate connections between the two, but I felt obligated to bring it up given the tendency for a lot of these companies to do copy-cat versions of theatrical films.
The story in The Legend of Atlantis is one of those ‘not terrible, but also not great’ plots. The story makes sense, it’s paced fairly well.. it’s mostly the execution that makes it come across as somewhat awkward and disjointed. I’ll give them credit for trying to cobble together something original though! I mentioned previously how I’ve sometimes bought Golden Films movies based off how much I enjoy a single song from the film. I ended up taking some time to go through their entire Youtube channel, where they’ve uploaded various songs, to see if I can spot any particularly atrocious songs that tickled my fancy.
One of the songs from The Legend of Atlantis somehow got completely butchered in the process of uploading the video to Youtube. The actual song in the movie is nowhere near as bad, the Youtube version almost sounds like there are two videos running at the same time. The video was uploaded in 2013 and has yet to be changed, I guess either no one cares about fixing it, or no one has noticed how cacophonous it is.
The Legend of Atlantis has a fair bit of stuff to laugh at, so I’d definitely recommend this one as an addition to your Bad Princess Movie Nights.
Bad Princess Movies 
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