Remember when I did my trailer review of this movie back in December? Well, given that it's been 6 months, I finally got to see this movie after it was pulled out of theaters because of how poorly it did at the box office! Considering Disney had only started to advertise it 2 months before it's release under it's Touchstone Picture's banner, it looks like they knew that this would be a plan for disaster! And given that this was made by George Lucas & his company Lucasfilms, it's rather odd how little they advertised it given that this is the guy who made Star Wars for gods sake! With actors like Evan Rachel Wood, Alan Cumming, Kristin Chenoweth & Maya Rudolph under it's belt, is this just a misunderstood gem that needs a little bit of love, or will it be another case of a gimmicky and crappy animated film looking for a quick buck? Let's find out!
Story: Well, everything I said in my trailer review is true! The story is all about love where there's 2 sides of the forest (the cliched good vs evil) where one is ruled by an evil bog king & the other by the fairies & elves with a love potion tying everything together as the main heroine has to save her sister all while learning to love again (yeah, that's how I can describe it in a nutshell cos it's pretty hard to follow surprisingly). Nothing about it even attempts to be original throughout & the plot is thinner than tissue paper because right from the get-go, you know EXACTLY what's gonna happen! Not only that, but the constant references to love throughout get absolutely irritating down to the point it made me disgusted with the notion of romance, and that's saying a lot coming from me as I'm a sucker for romance in movies. The execution doesn't really help as it has some of the most cliched dialoogue I have ever come across & it is so predictable it made me laugh with how ridiculous it all was! The only thing I can really give credit to is the fact that the main heroine & 'villain' are the ones to fall in love as it is an interesting concept (even if Beauty and the Beast and Shrek already did that with much better results), but the way it's executed along with the fact that their romance is VERY rushed (seriously, most of the movie lasts about 2 hours tops & they declare they love each other at the very end), this just drags it all down six feet under! The pacing doesn't really help either as it feels like it's taking forever thanks to the pointless musical numbers added in (believe me when I say that I have a lot to talk about in the songs section) along with the subplots for each character added in making it so confusing! As for the humour, none of it is funny, with bodily function jokes, predictable slapstick, crude humour & one part which made me want to vomit with Roland kissing an anatomically correct insect close-up in a post-credits scene.You know, for a movie all about love, I have never expressed so much hate for an animated movie since Happily N'Ever After, Legends of Oz & A Troll in Central Park! And by the way, George Lucas claimed this took 15 years to make which I don't buy for a second!
Animation: If there is ANYTHING good to say about this movie, it's that the animation is really good...except for the character designs looking very ugly (God, the creatures look repulsive & the fairies & elves easily fall into the uncanny valley look) & the world looking very VERY generic! The texturing is amazing from the fur of the animals to contrast of both sides of the forest & the attention to detail on everything, kind of like Blue Sky's Epic. Actually, let me correct that because this movie rips off so much from Epic like the green armour of Roland & his soldiers, both versions of the forest looking uncannily similar & the various types of animals being used as modes of transport. The backgrounds also look generic and it doesn't really help that we hardly have any time to take it all in thanks to all the stuff going on in the plot! The character animation feels pretty inconsistent as sometimes it does look nice like in the sword fighting scenes along with the diversity of the creatures in the forests, but at other times it feels like they took the cheap route with the background characters & most of the time in the songs, all the characters do is just fly or walk around. I feel really bad because it's clear that the animators put in so much effort into making this, but with atrocious character designs and a very generic world, it really just feels boring to watch!
Characters: Marianne, voiced by Evan Rachel Wood is just the generic 'badass' & 'tough' heroine from other movies in the past 10 years & has to learn to love again after Roland cheats on her before their wedding (I'm not going to bother hiding spoilers because I doubt anybody would even care), the Bog King, voiced by Alan Cumming, is at first the angsty villain that hates love because there's no complexity to him besides a cliched backstory who kidnaps Dawn so he can get the love potion back, but then predictably falls for Marianne. They do nothing to explain his motivation & Alan constantly has to ham it up even if ironically he sounds like he doesn't give a crap! As for Dawn, Marianne's younger sister, she's nothing more than a plot device & ends up falling in love with the Bog King under the influence of the love potion & can easily be classified as the blonde ditz stereotype who flirts with literally every fairy guy she sees. Sunny, voiced by Elijah Kelly, is the sassy black sidekick that's head over heels for Dawn & causes the chain of events by stealing the love potion, the Sugar Plum Fairy, voiced by Kristin Chenoweth, is the one who created the love potion & was trapped by the Bog King is absolutely infuriating and the Fairy King, voiced by Alfred Molina is an idiot who wants Marianne & Roland back together & doesn't learn anything by the end of the movie despite pointlessly saying the message out loud to the audience as if they weren't smart enough to figure it out already. Griselda, voiced by Maya Rudolph, is the Bog King's overbearing mother who wants to find him a wife & constantly preaches about love & the Bog King's minions are never EVER funny. But easily the absolute WORST out of all of them has to be Roland, voiced by Sam Palladio, who's pretty much a carbon copy of Prince Charming from the Shrek films being egotistical, foppish & in this case really annoying & is Marianne's initial love interest until he cheats on her (never thought you'd have adultery in a kid's film, huh?!) & becomes a very non threatening & stupid villain wanting Marianne to marry him so he can be king & gain an army! Add in the fact that it features really sub-par voice acting, the characters in this actually reminded me that the man behind this was also the same man behind Jar Jar Binks & Howard The Duck!
Songs: Like I mentioned in the trailer review, this movie does feature modern pop songs similar to Moulin Rouge, and boy are they out of place. I'm not saying the songs themselves are bad, in fact, the covers are actually kinda good, but the problems are they have no purpose to be in the film, drag it on making it feel like an eternity & give it a very dated feeling. Most of them don't even have any segway into them like a cover version of Heart's Straight On coming out of nowhere during a sword fighting scene, Dawn singing Sugar Pie Honey Bunch under the influence of the love potion, Roland singing Cmon Marianne somehow culminating in Marianne singing Kelly Clarkson's Stronger & so much more! Some even referenced like Beyonce's Crazy in Love, The Black Eyed Peas' I Gotta Feeling, Lady Gaga's Bad Romance & Whitney Houston's I Wanna Dance With Somebody either as cameos or the characters actually saying the lyrics in conversation, the latter of which which makes no sense whatsoever. And oddly enough, I don't think the songs show off the singing voices of the actors enough (except for Evan Rachel Wood & obviously Kristin Chenoweth), especially with Alan Cumming as his character's theme song Mistreated is just repetetive lyrics sung over & over with the same melody and Sam Palladio is pretty much wasted despite being a singer more than an actor (which clearly shows). And if I had to chose the 'best' covers of the songs completely ignoring the context or visuals that accompany them, it'd probably be Sunny's version of Three Little Birds and the title song Strange Magic sung by the two main characters in a lazily put together love montage. Despite the covers themselves not being 'bad' per se, the addition of them in the movie in the first place just makes it feel so dated along with making you feel baffled with how out of place they all are!
Overall, Strange Magic has to be one of the worst animated films I've ever seen period! With very nice yet very unoriginal animation, it doesn't do anything to glance over the paper thin story, one dimensional characters & songs which are so out of place & unecessary! In fact, if I had seen this in the cinema, it would've been the first movie I'd have ever walked out on! That's how angry this movie makes me & my recommendation is to just stay away from it! And given how badly it did at the box office liked I mentioned, it looks like it'll fade into obscurity pretty quickly!
Story: 1/10
Animation: 4/10
Characters: 2/10
Songs: 3/10
Overall: 2/10
Remember when I did my trailer review of this movie back in December? Well, given that it's been 6 months, I finally got to see this movie after it was pulled out of theaters because of how poorly it did at the box office! Considering Disney had only started to advertise it 2 months before it's release under it's Touchstone Picture's banner, it looks like they knew that this would be a plan for disaster! And given that this was made by George Lucas & his company Lucasfilms, it's rather odd how little they advertised it given that this is the guy who made Star Wars for gods sake! With actors like Evan Rachel Wood, Alan Cumming, Kristin Chenoweth & Maya Rudolph under it's belt, is this just a misunderstood gem that needs a little bit of love, or will it be another case of a gimmicky and crappy animated film looking for a quick buck? Let's find out! 
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