Originally published January 24, 2015 on FrontRowCentral.com
Conceived by George Lucas and directed by longtime Lucas protégé Gary Rydstrom, Strange Magic has apparently been in the works for years. That may explain why it feels so completely dated at this point. Stylistically, the woodland setting bears a striking resemblance to Blue Sky’s 2013 film Epic, and the idea of adapting a Shakespeare play (In this case, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) into an animated jukebox musical is so Gnomeo & Juliet it hurts. But you know what they say: there’s nothing truly original anymore. So what if two B-grade animated features beat Lucasfilm to the punch? So what if the film’s musical numbers come across like rejected arrangements from a botched episode of Glee? So what if Strange Magic’s message about love conquering all ultimately turns out to be a bit insidious?
Where the hell do I even start?
The film takes place in some vaguely-defined forest realm divided into two kingdoms. We start in the Fairy Kingdom, home to all the human-looking fairies and cute little critters. It’s wedding day for Princess Marianne (Evan Rachel Wood) and warrior Roland (Nashville’s Sam Palladio, really leaning into his Southern accent). When she catches him cheating on her, Roland decides the only way to win her back and seal the deal is with a love potion. He sends an elf named Sunny (Elijah Kelley) into the Dark Forest to find the Sugar Plum Fairy (Kristin Chenoweth), who’s being held captive by the Bog King (Alan Cumming). Sunny wants to use the love potion himself on Marianne’s sister Dawn (Meredith Anne Bull), which sets off a chain reaction of hijinks, misunderstandings, confused intentions and musical montages.
The Bog King — whose name I honestly thought was Bug King, because A) he’s a bug, B) he doesn’t actually live in a bog, and C) no two characters pronounce “Bog King” the same way — has banned love potions for disrupting the natural order of things. This eventually turns out to be a good policy, because right up until it’s revealed that true love is the only thing that can break the spell of a love potion, everyone seems pretty cool with the idea of a potion that forces someone to love you. Nobody even gives the idea a second thought. Hell, the whole plot is set in motion by two guys who see it as their only way out of the friendzone.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Long before the film’s message shakes itself out, you’re probably going to find your brain melting out of your skull thanks to some truly heinous musical numbers. Things start off well enough with Marianne singing “Can’t Help Falling in Love” to herself, with the tune weaving its way into the score. After that, though, things fall off a cliff as the film throws about a dozen other repurposed tunes at us with little rhyme or reason. Things hit rock bottom during a mashup of The Four Seasons’ “C’mon Marianne” and Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger,” as Roland and Marianne sing these back and forth at each other in lieu of actual dialogue. Musicals do this kind of thing all the time, but when one song directly addresses a character and the other is clearly rhetorical, it makes the whole scene a blur of nonsense.
Then there are other songs that feel lazily chosen, or simply thrown in to finish eating up the licensing money. Queen, Beyonce, Heart, Lady Gaga, Bob Marley, Deep Purple and ELO all get the Lucasfilm treatment. Some of these work better than others; the “rah rah ah-ah-ah” part of “Bad Romance” becomes a marching chant for Roland’s soldiers, for example. But then the film ends on “Wild Thing,” which no longer feels cool and edgy after being run through the filter of children’s cinema for the past forty years. The soundtrack Strange Magic has assembled is genuinely impressive, but the way the film deploys most of these songs is clumsy and honestly kind of embarrassing.
Getting back to the actual story for a moment, the film is so baldly distrustful of its young audience that no fewer than three characters show up at the end to straight up tell us the moral of the story. The Bog King’s mother (Maya Rudolph) says, “Teaching moment: There are no shortcuts to love!” She actually prefaces the lesson by telling us it’s a lesson. And then the Fairy King (Alfred Molina) tells us to never judge a book by its cover. He then immediately faints in shock after seeing Dawn making out with Sunny. Ha ha, I guess dear old dad didn’t really learn his lesson. Also, I guess he’s a little bit of a racist. Yeah, that’s the note we want our children’s movie to end on.
Strange Magic is not a film I’d recommend seeing in theaters, or really even at all. It’s a kaleidoscopic nightmare of Magic: The Gathering art set to the tune of whatever season of Glee you might happen to be watching. The only redeeming factor in this whole mess is that Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic are still more than capable of churning out quality animation. I just wish they’d use their resources delivering the next Rango.
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