Strange Magic (2015) Reviews

Initial Thought: I remember seeing the trailer and noticing how simply awful it looked. It looked like it was made for like three year olds. Anyways I am going to watch this for your sake.

Characters/Acting: It does have a fairly decent cast with the likes of Alan Cumming, Evan Rachel Wood, and Alfred Molina. It does also have Maya Rudolph and Tony Cox though. I thought the character and creature designs were quite good. The characters themselves were just kind of forgettable. I do say though I have never seen a southern fairy other than I guess the ones from True Blood. I'm talking about the cartoon winged type of fairies though. Everyone has pretty nice singing voices besides the usual singers. Maya Rudolph was annoying as usual to me. I did like most of the characters especially the Bog King.

Story: It's a fairy tale musical reimagining of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The way the musical numbers are set up is very odd. It feels as if they wanted to pile on as many different songs as they could without putting in real substance in them. Some of the song choices were kind of lame. This has elements from a lot of different stories, but it mostly feels like a bargain bin copycat of Epic. There are a few giggle worthy scenes. There are a few things here that don't feel like they belong since it is a kid movie. The story here is fairly decent, but I just really couldn't get into most of the music here. There are a few twists I thought were different for movies like this. I didn't like the way the ending looked. There is a scene midway into the credits if you didn't lose interest in the whole thing.

Directing/Writing: Oh that's not good it took three people one of which is the director to write this story by George Lucas. David Berenbaum doesn't have good credit with writing films such as Elf, Zoom, and Haunted Mansion. His only good work was Spiderwick Chronicles of which is based off his book of the same name. Gary Rydstrom is mostly known very writing and directing Pixar short films. There seems to be a reason for that. Irene Mecchi is the best writer here with Lion King, Hercules, and Brave under her belt. George Lucas is the one that is known by face and name though. You either love or hate his work. Either way Star Wars is such a popular franchise that it doesn't even matter. The problem is that he really shouldn't try to do things like this. I suggest he stay in the comforts of a far far away rather than creating new stories.

Final Thought: This was not as bad as I was expecting it to be. In fact the story saves it. If the music was the power here with a poor story it would have been atrocious. I probably won't watch it again. I may even forget most of the story. As it stands now though I say it was watchable. It would have been better with different music or none at all. It could have been much worse though.