As far as animated mock busters go, Tappy Toes is one of the least bad. It is far from a good movie, but unlike most other animated mock busters the DVD cover for it was really cool, and again it does attempt to do things differently to its inspiration Happy Feet instead of blatantly ripping it off. How Pingo discovers tap dancing is also in my opinion more believable and makes more sense than with Mumble for Happy Feet, so Tappy Toes deserves some credit in this regard.
The flash animation(not CGI as the DVD cover seemed to imply) is neither terrible or great. Some of the backgrounds are handsome and some of the colours nice, but most of it is rather flat and spare and the character designs(especially that of the main seal antagonist) are rather limited in movement and weirdly proportioned. The music is very often the opposite of toe-tapping, and was in need of more whimsy and less of the loud action soundtrack quality. The tap dancing is sweet and looks decent but not always imaginative. There are some genuinely funny moments here, but not consistently. Much of the dialogue in Tappy Toes is very bad, the dialogue between the villains being especially face-palm worthy(i.e. the 'places to pinch' line, the seal's not-sure-what-to-think facial expression mirrors exactly how the audience will be feeling).
Tappy Toes is short in length at only forty minutes and has some very sweet parts. Not all the pacing works however, some of it is efficient but some of it is draggy and like it was trying to stretch out the story and the running time. Regarding the story, while there are some funny and sweet parts(which is another big improvement over most animated mock busters), there's not a lot to it(most of it actually is very thinly plotted) and a good deal of it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Particularly true to this is the dynamic between the two main villains, not since Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales has there been a weirder and more senseless dynamic/pairing in animation(I'd say it's even more so here), if the movie gave a reason for the pairing and why the mastermind was the crab and not the seals it would have been much easier to swallow.
As for the characters, they fail to engage, with the exception of adorable Pingo. The main seal villain is incredibly annoying with a voice that makes the ears bleed, the crab has no real personality or motivation and is saddled with the worst of the movie's dialogue, the father's constant pessimism didn't come over very realistically and instead rather forced and the rest of the characters are bland. The voice acting is a mix of flat and irritatingly over-eager, nobody apart from the voice work of Pingo which has a cute factor without being shrill sounded like they were happy to do this.
Overall, not particularly good and lacking in a lot of areas, but actually has its moments and is one of the better animated mock busters around(which is saying a lot, as most of them are dreadful). 4/10 Bethany Cox
