The Magic Voyage was probably better in German. I doubt even then that it would have been very good - a bad dub does not cause ugly character designs, stiff  animation, or stupid concepts - but it would have to work very hard to be worse. The film is a fictional account of Christopher Columbus’s journey to the America, where he gets the idea that the Earth is round from a friendly woodworm named Pico. Columbus and Pico travel across the sea, Columbus hoping to find gold, Pico hoping to rescue a fairy princess named Marilyn from an evil mass of insects known as “The Swarm”. They sing a lot - in fact, one of Columbus’s songs is what keeps his crew from mutinying. There are other talking animals, and some more songs, and then Columbus lands on an “Itty-Bitty Island” that, we later learn, becomes New York.
I wont dwell too much on the film’s historical inaccuracies - because, really, it’s not that much less reliable then any other adaptation of this tale. I do, however, have a few choice words for the voice cast - namely the late Dom Deluise (Columbus) and Corey Feldman (Pico). We already know that these two men know how to do voice acting - they’ve both done great work for major companies in the past. So what happened, here? Why are they muttering most of their lines? Why are they talking when the characters on-screen are so obviously being silent. Why are they explaining everything that is seen and felt - to the point that, after receiving a kiss from Marilyn, Pico happily exclaims “I like kissing!”? Why is Dom Deluise doing a fake accent - especially such an obvious one? Why are talents like them even in a direct-to-video piece of crap like this?
At times, the dialogue becomes so ridiculous that I began to feel like they were intentionally trying to make fun of the material. But if that is indeed what was happening, they still failed. The dialogue is never funny, not even in a -”Wow, that’s dumb” kind of way - it never gets past “painful to watch”. Worst of all are the few songs, which make even the most ridiculous of Disney lyrics from the 90s look well thought out. The best and worst thing about the whole script is how forgettable it is - worst because it means that the movie fails to achieve even the most basic goal of entertainment, best because it means that you wont have to have this crap in your head for too long.
Still, enough about the dub - some blame for the mess this movie is has to be laid at the feet of the animators. I don’t mind that Pico doesn’t look like a wood-worm, but I do mind that he looks like a mascot from a crappy cartoon from the 80s. Columbus and the other humans have even less appealing designs - they all have exaggerated, cartoony features with none of the fluidity that makes such aspects look good. Marilyn looks like a cross between Tinker Bell and a Bratz doll. Other animal characters, like three greedy rats who stow-away on the Santa Maria, are vaguely unoffensive, but they certainly don’t look good - and nobody can ever seem to decide how big the non-human characters are supposed to be. At times they seem like they could beat up Columbus and take his wallet, but in other shots they barely come up to his knees.
There is one character who looks good in the entire film, and that is The Swarm - a mass of living bugs who take the shape of gigantic spiders and ants and such. The inherent genius behind such an idea is present during other sections of the movie as well, like a dream sequence where Columbus falls off the World’s edge, or a surreal couple of pieces where Columbus recalls the adventures of other famous sailors. These are all good bits of animation that are effectively ruined by Deluise’s prattling, but watch them on mute and they’re more then palatable. There’s also some beautiful backgrounds displayed during many sequences, which makes me wonder, again, how so many talented people got wrapped up in such a failure.
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