The film Strange Magic answers two age-old questions. First, what would happen if George Lucas made a movie inspired by what was on his iPod? And second, what would happen if George Lucas refused to sell Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney Company unless they released an odd pet project of his? Of course, we may never be able to confirm that either of these questions actually are true, but it’s hard not to wonder when watching this truly misguided animated misfire from early in 2015. Considering that Disney is likely grateful to own Lucasfilm, allowing them to make roughly 18 billion Star Wars movies from now until the end of time, their treatment of Strange Magic is, quality aside, uniquely insulting. The film wasn’t announced publicly until November 2014 (even though, per the film’s director Gary Rydstrom, it was in production before Disney officially purchased Lucasfilm), and its home-media release amounts to a DVD. No Blu-ray. Just a DVD.
And yet, it’s awfully hard to look past the quality of Strange Magic, which is quite awful indeed. Ostensibly inspired by William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this film takes place in a magical land divided into two sections: the Fairy Kingdom and the Dark Forest. (Three guesses which the presumably evil part is, and the first two don’t count.) Our leads are Marianne (voiced by Evan Rachel Wood), the princess of the Fairy Kingdom, and the Bog King (Alan Cumming), the leader of the Dark Forest. When we first meet Marianne, she’s giddy with the prospect of marrying the beautiful and dashing Roland, until she catches Roland making out with another random fairy. (He quickly bemoans the fact that he’ll never have an army to lead now, which makes you wonder why he chose to cheat on his future wife at all, but never mind.) Heart hardened, Marianne spurns love until a suitor for her sister’s hand spreads a love potion around both kingdoms. After a series of convoluted machinations, she finds herself falling for, of all people, the Bog King himself. The feeling, to quote Mel Brooks, is mu-chal.
At this point, it may seem like criticizing Strange Magic is the equivalent of kicking a guy when he’s down. Leaving aside the home-media release (but seriously, what’s the last widely released film by a major studio that wasn’t released on Blu-ray?), Strange Magic was a financial failure. Its opening weekend at the end of January is among the ten lowest wide releases of all time at the box office. And yet, time to start kicking. At best, Strange Magic is merely baffling, a lengthy fable teaching the moral that, per the poster, everyone deserves to be loved. Its ending unites a superficially good-looking character with a superficially hideous-looking one; as Lucas once said, it’s like Disney’s Beauty and the Beast if the Beast never transforms into a hunky prince at the end. There’s nothing wrong with such a message, of course, but the delivery system is so lifeless and groan-inducing that it’s impossible to overlook this film’s flaws.
The character design, even on an HDTV, remains supremely unpleasant, and the production design looks like a carbon copy of roughly a half-dozen other computer-animated films of recent memory. (In a special feature on the disc, Lucas says he wanted the film to look like it could be shot in someone’s backyard. Not so.) Though the characters feel fairly uninspired, and the plot is riddled with so many holes that there may not be any plot left to debate, the true culprit here is the soundtrack. A mostly sung-through film is all well and good, but Strange Magic is full of the most obvious choices to express its characters’ emotions. Want a character to suggest that she’s through with love? How about Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” with a more up-tempo feeling? What about when a character needs to explain how kooky love can be? How about “Love is Strange”? And when two oddly coupled characters express their feelings? Look no further than the title of the film.
Strange Magic has its heart in the right place. Telling people to accept themselves and love one another is an admirable message, but admirable messages and good movies don’t often find themselves in bed together. Perhaps a decade ago, this would feel more like a novelty that Disney had to release to appease George Lucas. (Lucas, it should be noted, is the film’s executive producer and is credited with the story, but it’s hard not to see his influence everywhere; the Fairy King, voiced by Alfred Molina, even looks like him.) In 2015, a computer-animated movie set in a magical forest with pop songs, pop-culture references, and an out-of-left-field love story isn’t special or new. It’s a warmed-over version of a Shrek sequel.
A/V
As mentioned above, Strange Magic has been inexplicably released on DVD (and will be available to rent or own on digital platforms in HD), and not Blu-ray. So while it may be true that the movie looks and sounds fine (though how it looks and sounds is another story), keep in mind that you won’t be getting HD quality from the physical disc. And keep in mind that you just bought a physical copy of Strange Magic, which is a fact you should probably hide from your friends and neighbors.
Extras
In spite of its shuffled-under-the-rug DVD release, there are two special features on the Strange Magic DVD: a brief behind-the-scenes featurette with talking-head interviews from Lucas, Rydstrom, Wood, Cumming, and a few more folks involved in the production; and a four-minute montage of singing outtakes and a glimpse into how the animation appeared in early production stages. If you can’t surmise as much about these extras from the description, you are encouraged to look up the word “insubstantial” in the dictionary.
Overall
Strange Magic is a bad movie, a very bad one indeed, even if its moral is one with which I agree. I’ve now seen the movie twice, which is something hopefully very few other people outside its production can say. Run away. Run far away.