I decided to watch this movie with my girlfriend as we are both animation fans, but in the end I almost fell asleep as midway in the movie my interest in it had faded to nought.

In terms of animation, Donkey Xote is not bad, but that's pretty much the only thing it's got going for it. Characters lack a certain charisma and that's painfully obvious when the collage to Shrek is more notorious, namely with Rucio. This donkey could well be, well, Donkey's twin and I wonder how many kids will get fooled and then disappointed since Rucio pales in comparison.

The story itself is weak, feels rushed with some plot devices ending in seconds, others with a purpose that doesn't seem to exist. Everything also feels dumbed down, with only a few moments where the jokes don't feel cliché and hugely predictable. The characters are thrown at you with little in the way of introduction, their rich background quite absent, and I feel you really don't get many chances to end up relating to most of them.

Sure this movie will be passable for kids, but the beauty of movies like Shrek is that the plots were deep enough with some more adult jokes thrown in to appeal to older audiences. That is something I found this movie quite lacking. Another thing is that Donkey Xote also missed a great opportunity to give children a taste of one of humanity's most brilliant literary works, replacing it with something rather flat.

My ten year old daughter and I just keep looking at each other in disbelief throughout this whole movie. The plot is awful, hard to follow, thrown together, and a big pile of crap, really. Attempts at humor are thrown in, random, and unfunny. This movie is BAD, and not in a good way. The animation is fairly decent, but as this kind of technology becomes more readily available for low budget producers, more junk of this kind will continue to be put out. It all seemed forced. They forced to get a plot line, they forced to get some humor, and they forced to create an emotional story that would draw the viewer in. I have to tell ya, they fail on every count.

While the animation and style of the movie aren't half bad, in fact (besides of background stuff and vegetation not exactly moving much and the characters seeming lifeless every now and then) it seems better than a lot other animated movies (except anything by Pixar or Dreamworks of course).

That said the writing is horrible, mainly because the story doesn't seem to make any sense WHATSOEVER. From what I gathered it seems to play a few years after Don Quixote's fight against the windmills and all of his adventures and the movie is to about 50% about Sancho's Donkey (thus called Donkey Xote). The actions and traits of the characters deviate from one scene to another and the story even gets into the bizarre at times.

For example we got a "bad guy", that isn't really evil... more conflicted or confused cause he wants to get famous. And he seems to be the kind of guy that believes the best way to make you leave a city would be to make everyone else disappear so you feel unwelcome, then block all the rivers and burn all the food so you'll have to leave after a while instead of say throwing you out directly... and while that might have some sort of style it's illogical and this movie is riddled with similar stuff. Also there's some of his minions that want to kill some of the protagonists at one point and after the heroes managed to save themselves, there doesn't seem to be any grudge and both parties just walk away.

With a decent script this could've been a nice animated movie similar to say Shrek but as it stands right now it's somewhere between a 3-4 for me.