For me the first thing that comes to mind is Tales from Earthsea. I don’t think it’s excellent or anything and has plenty of problems but people act like it killed their dog. While it has its problems that have been covered extensively, I think it has a beautiful atmosphere and art.
IMO it would have been better received if it wasn’t advertised as an Earthsea adaptation and was just its own thing.
Yeah, I can see how watching The Fifth Element now compared to 1997 would be a pretty bad experience. At the time a lot of the concepts in the film were new and edgy to the wider audience, but now that we’ve got the internet we see way more obscene stuff on the daily.
It’s kind of like how the Rocky Horror Picture Show was a musical about being deathly afraid of satanist transvestites in 1973, but nowadays it plays off as more of a parody.
It was pretty uniformly popular in France, but elsewhere it did rather split opinion. Critics were not kind to it then either, but considering it was originally a teenage pet project of Besson’s but later got concept art from Mézières and Moebius explains a lot.
First I thought you meant RHPS, and I thought, popular in France, that makes sense…