“Strange Magic”

“At least it can’t get any worse,” a character suggests roughly halfway through Strange Magic, a promise the film has no intention of keeping. This riff on William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream does indeed feel as if it sprung “from the mind of George Lucas,” as the trailers shout, seeing as it’s a misguided and moderately painful misfire, from the garish character design to the overuse of familiar pop songs to its mealy and heavy-handed moralizing. No doubt, a story about how physical looks don’t (or shouldn’t) matter to a couple falling for each other is admirable, but there’s not a moment of Strange Magic, especially when promoting this message, that feels anything less than forced and dishonest.

The story takes place in a magical land divided by magical primrose flowers, which are used to concoct a very powerful love potion. (But the potion’s not that powerful, as we learn later, and also, the potion can only be made by a currently imprisoned fairy. Yet these are mere trifles, obstacles so small and pointless that you almost wonder why they even exist.) One side is the Fairy Kingdom, full of goodness and light and blandly colorful plant life; the other is the Dark Forest, a generally unpleasant place colored in all brown and dark green, led by the nasty Bog King (Alan Cumming), who wishes to eradicate love because he’s never been loved himself. His plan to rid the land of primroses–the only way to stop love from flourishing, apparently?–is tarnished when the Fairy Kingdom’s lovelorn princesses, Marianne and Dawn (Evan Rachel Wood and Meredith Anne Bull), are chased by suitors like the ignoble Roland (Sam Palladio) and the kind Sunny (Elijah Kelley). When Sunny acquires a love potion for both he and Roland to use, the effects (and potion) blow up in everyone’s face, complications ensue, and so on and so on until the last song is sung.

Yes, Strange Magic is another entry in the most terrifying genre in modern popular culture, a jukebox musical. It features songs that appear to be the product of Lucas handing his iPod over to director and co-writer Gary Rydstrom and saying, “Use these songs and nothing else, kthxbai.” The tone is set instantly, as we meet Marianne singing “Can’t Help Falling In Love”; soon after, songs such as “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again” and “Wild Thing” are sampled injudiciously. The use of these compositions, with smatterings of overplayed oldies and equally overplayed newbies, is inspiring; specifically, it inspires growing unease and disgust, as when Bob Einstein and Peter Stormare, voicing the Bog King’s minions, sing a slow mood piece that reveals itself to be The Black-Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling.” Though Cumming, Wood, and fellow cast member Kristen Chenoweth are all talented singers, only Kelley imbues any life or personality into the music, his rendition of Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” is the closest the film comes to a highlight.

And the message that “everyone deserves love” is as muddled as can be; once Marianne discovers that Roland has been making time with another unnamed fairy, she renounces l’amour until she meets and tussles with the Bog King. Never mind that he’s currently holding her sister hostage, because hey, he’s been there, you know? He’s lost a love, too! They’re BFFs now! And looks clearly don’t matter–the Bog King is, as you might expect from the name, a nasty and gruesome creature, while Marianne is supposedly quite pretty. Frankly, looks can’t matter in Strange Magic when all of its characters are so hideous to look at: the fairies, particularly, are the product of what seems like motion-capture animation in the style of Robert Zemeckis’ recent animated fare. The nearly human faces are as off-putting as the various beasties that make up the Dark Forest, and yet only the latter are meant to be displeasing to the eye. The production design is unremarkable at best, feeling of a piece with films like Epic: forgettably bright and colorful. Strange Magic is the kind of computer-animated film that makes you wish that hand-drawn animation could make a comeback, and soon.

“Off-putting” is perhaps the briefest and most accurate summation of Strange Magic, which bears the George Lucas sensibility through and through. A long time ago, in a–well, you know, Lucas brought the world a genuinely rousing series of adventures with the original Star Wars trilogy. Since then, Lucas’ power to create legitimately magical stories, characters, and worlds has seemingly dissipated. Even if he’s not the credited director (and Rydstrom has made better short films, such as Pixar’s Lifted), it’s difficult not to think of Lucas at all times watching this mess. Hell, one of the characters–Alfred Molina’s Fairy King–even looks like him. Just as the Star Wars prequels inspire nostalgia for the originals, Strange Magic inspires a similar kind of wistful longing: for a time when animated films could convey complex messages clearly and subtly, and do so without looking like a frantic, manic nightmare.