The Swan Princess: The Mystery of the Enchanted Treasure the third Swan Princess movie and the second of the sequels. It came out in 1998 and is sadly the last hand-drawn Swan Princess movie. This was also the last time Michelle Nicastro voiced Odette. It also sometimes called The Swan Princess: The Mystery of the Enchanted Kingdom. It also pretty much has the same plot as the first sequel.
A former partner of Rothbart wants something that is hidden in Derek and Odette’s castle. But instead of a discount Saruman who wants an orb, it’s a lady, Zelda, who wants notes on a magic spell that can do the same thing as the orb, which is create, change and destroy.
Derek however ripped the last word off the notes, so Zelda kidnaps Odette. It’s the same plot except the subplot is a festival and not Uberta’s birthday.
Odette and Derek are still bland boring characters so let’s just discuss the new characters, Zelda and her forced minion Whizzer, a frighten yakey-bird who can mimic voices.
Unlike the villain in the last movie, Clavius, Zelda gets into the castle with deception and flirts with Rogers. Rogers’ crush on her does led to a legit silly joke. After she gets what she wants and leaves, Rogers is beside himself and says maybe he read her good bye-note wrong, he then reads said note. which is is like “Dear Muffin, I Hate you, Love Zelda.” That may not be 100% correct but the timing by Rogers was great. Other than that Zelda is boring, she just wants power and that last word on the stupid destroy spell.
Whizzer, the bird minion does get a minor arc. He is scared and then the pond pals drill in the “No Fear” mantra and yay No Fear. It’s not great but what fuck do want from a Swan Princess Sequel? And Still this is still at least semi-watchable.
One issue I have with Whizzer is that he mimics Rothbart’s voice to trick Zelda but when did he ever hear Rothbart’s voice to mimic? I would question this more if I cared. Also since I’m on the topic of nitpicking, if Derek was in the position to rip the notes, why didn’t he destroy then like Odette had wanted? I mean yes plot but still so dumb.
I would say I recall the songs better in this movie a little bit more than the first movie but that could be because Derek’s love song basically just repeats animation from the original movie. Zelda’s song is also very derivative of the Rothbart’s song in tone. The songs are meh. The animation is on par with the first sequel, dull, muted and not special.
The Swan Princess: The Mystery of the Enchanted Treasure is by no means a good movie or even a sequal. It had one good joke and that is pretty much it. It’s not the worse thing you can watch and is by no means even the worse of The Princess Swans movies because they just get so much worse after this one.