Maybe it is simply that Pixar’s high quality cinematic renderings have spoiled one but Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists only emerges as looking like a Pixar test reel, a rough cut that has not yet been put through the dissonant texturing that goes into making up the Pixar quality. The animation is minimal and limited – it feels cut price. For all its claim about realistic movements, many scenes – in particular the barroom fight sequence early in the show – are dully directed and uninvolving. Certainly, few audiences went to see Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists when it came out and it received a very sparse theatrical run.

While nearly half of the film convinces one that the results are going to be entirely routine, it is during the middle sections that the film turns around to surprise one’s expectations of it altogether. Despite the limited animation, some scenes like the navigation of the waterfall with the crew trying to escape from the ship hanging on the edge of the rocks, followed by the venture into the maze and encounter with the various creatures there are built into something exciting. The maze sequence becomes increasingly surreal and eventually develops into something altogether amazing – with Sinbad and Serena being swallowed by a giant manta ray that turns out to be a giant robotic sea harvesting creature; their passage through a field of giant mushrooms that are being harvested by fish people; and visions of upward flowing rivers and waterspouts that are seemingly holding up the bottom of the ocean. It is here that the film blossoms out of Arabian Nights cliches and becomes something almost science-fictional. The results take one aback with the conceptual wildness of imagination.

One other good thing about the film is that its non-American origin gives it ethnically realistic faces for the Arabian Nights mythological background it draws on – indeed, this is the first Sinbad film to feature non-Caucasian faces (although the hero and heroine are definitely drawn with more of an ethnic neutrality).
 

Trailer here:-