In Quest for Camelot, Excalibur is stolen by a turncoat knight who's developed an alchemical process that fuses mammals and weapons. In a remote corner of the British Isles, young Kayley dreams of being a knight like her father, even though she's a girl. Kayley leaps at the chance to rescue Excalibur from the Forbidden Forest. In this Warner Brothers animated feature, the characters are drawn to closely resemble those of recent Disney features, and the formula is the same. Plucky heroine, some lessons (cooperation, learning when to be quiet, girls can be heroes and get married too), and a mostly soppy soft-rock soundtrack. Quest for Camelot isn't awful, but it could have been so much better. The only sequence that has the zip and anarchy of old WB animation, or even Disney's The Jungle Book, is the one with a two-headed dragon (Eric Idle and Don Rickles) singing a rousing "If I Didn't Have You."
The voices, including Gary Oldman, Pierce Brosnan and Sir John Gielgud, are wasted. What animation needs is not great actors but actors with interesting voices, like Idle.
