Animated musical fairy tale an annoying, fantastical fail
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/01/2015 (3880 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
STRANGE Magic is strange all right, but hardly magical.
An oddly tone-deaf jukebox musical and computer-animated fantasy, its target audience seems unclear. Kids aren’t likely to know or care much about the bulk of the love songs, which span six decades.
Producer/writer George Lucas has said his goal was to use lyrics from his favourite tunes to tell a fairy tale about two creatures from warring magical worlds who fall in love.
The story feels pieced together from a host of sources. It has echoes of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the fantasy film/book FernGully, and it mashes up fairy-tale lore with The Nutcracker ballet. A couple of characters seem influenced by sisters Anna and Elsa from Frozen and a brawny blowhard is very similar to Beauty and the Beast’s Gaston.
The result is a peculiar hodgepodge with jarring musical interludes. Featuring songs from Elvis Presley to Beyoncé, this uninvolving tale of fairies, elves, goblins and insect monsters centres around a love potion made of primrose petals.
Purple-winged fairy princess Marianne (Evan Rachel Wood) is about to marry the winged Roland (Sam Palladio), when she catches him kissing another fairy. Then she finds out all Roland wanted from their marriage was an army of his own. She calls off the wedding and grows bitter. Meanwhile, her sister Dawn (Meredith Anne Bull) longs to fall in love and seems to have crushes on several of the eligible males in their enchanted fairyland, but her best friend Sunny (Elijah Kelley) wishes she loved him as he loves her.
The Sugar Plum Fairy (Kristin Chenoweth) has been kidnapped and imprisoned inside the nearby Dark Forest. Only she knows how to make the love potion Sunny and Roland decide is the answer to their problems.
The one who imprisoned her, the Bog King (Alan Cumming), presides over the Dark Forest and is bitter about love, having been spurned years before. His meddlesome mother Griselda (Maya Rudolph) yearns for her son to settle down and find a nice girl. He comes off as upper-crust British, while his mother sounds as though she could be from the Jersey shore (that’s New Jersey, not the British isle).
Always feisty, Marianne has become rebellious. She’s honed her martial skills and scorns the notion of love. When her sister gets taken by the Bog King and his minions — in retaliation for Sunny stealing the love potion — Marianne goes to the forest to rescue her. In the process she and the insect-styled Bog King set off sparks.
Nearly everything about this animated tale feels dated and cobbled together.
At its best, Strange Magic is reminiscent of the 1986 fantasy Labyrinth, produced by Lucas and directed by Jim Henson, but mostly it feels like a fairy-tale stew.
— USA Today