“People go, ‘Well, that was kind of a crappy movie,’ and I go, ‘Let’s play the game, then.’ Play the Congo game. You’re an executive, and I’m going to pitch you a story. It’s a bestselling novel written by Michael Crichton, produced by Steven Spielberg, edited by Anne V. Coates – she edited Lawrence of Arabia – photographed by Allen Daviau – he shot E.T. . Would you make that movie? Yeah? Congratulations. You just made Congo. So, on paper, some things sound good.” – Bruce Campbell, reflecting on the critical dud Congo.
There’s no good reason why the animated family adventure Spellbound is this bad. It’s the kind of project that – on paper – has everything going for it. It’s produced by former Pixar head John Lasseter. It’s from one of the directors of the original Shrek. It features music from Disney’s golden age ace-in-the-hole Alan Menken. The lead member of its voice cast is an award winning performer known for their powerhouse vocals. If you were a producer, and you had all this talent and top notch animators at your disposal, would you make that movie? You probably would. And congratulations. You just made Spellbound, and all you can do is wonder where everything went so horribly wrong.
Princess Ellian (voiced by Rachel Zegler) of the Kingdom of Lumbria has just turned fifteen and her world is crashing down around her. Her ruling parents have been turned into “hideous” (but actually adorable) monsters, and she has been covering for their lack of public appearances with the help of close consorts Nazara (Jennifer Lewis) and Bolinar (John Lithgow). But people have been making inquiries as to what’s going on, and many are pushing Ellian to take over the throne. In a bid to save her family, Ellian is told by a couple of goofball oracles (Nathan Lane and Tituss Burgess) that she has to travel into the dark and mysterious Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness (which is actually quite colourful) to discover whatever the heck it is her parents did to turn into monsters and how she can switch them back to their human forms.
Spellbound goes from blank screen to utter trainwreck in record time. Why? Because there’s absolutely no first act to Spellbound. None. The parents are already monsters. The kingdom is already in political and social shambles. It launches almost immediately into a musical number that spells out the scene to follow, but gives zero explanation as to what the heck is going on, why we should care, or who any of these characters even are. If I wasn’t viewing this film at home, and didn’t physically press play on it, I honestly would’ve thought I started watching Spellbound twenty minutes after it had already began. It’s a tremendously egregious storytelling fumble – one of the most baffling of the year in any type of movie – and it creates a void that the rest of the film can’t overcome.
Any explanation for what might be going on in Spellbound doesn’t come for an entire 45 minutes (around the time the monster parents start speaking with the human voices of Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman, neither adding much), with director Vicky Jenson and the writing team settling for quantity over quality in terms of visuals and songs. The script is practically immaterial to anything that’s happening. Spellbound wants to shock and awe with its use of colour and theatricality, but it never once does anything original. The characters look like uninspired, lazy knock-offs, with Ellian in particular looking like someone created her appearance using one of those “make yourself into a Pixar character” memes that was going around about a decade ago. The monsters aren’t scary. They’re downright cuddly outside of trying to eat everything around them, so it’s really hard to buy into any of the stakes here. The only good visual gag involves a giant amphibian Uber that the oracles use to travel around. That got the film’s sole laughs out of me.
Zegler does all she can to sell the musical numbers, but the lyrics from Glenn Slater (Tangled) are instantly forgettable and devoid of real hooks, and Menken’s score doesn’t fare much better. And there are a lot of songs. A lot. So many that they crash into each other at certain points. It’s a full on musical assault, delivered by people who should know better, but are somehow stuck on autopilot.
Eventually, Spellbound reveals itself to be a wafer thin parable about divorce, but that isn’t made entirely clear until the credits have almost rolled. Before that, Spellbound is an aimless, low investment animated debacle that buckles under the weight of too much stuffing and not enough support. I sat watching Spellbound slack jawed for almost its entire running time, baffled by its awfulness. It’s the type of unmitigated disaster that could only be made by really talented people who have completely lost the plot.
Spellbound is now playing in select theatres and streaming on Netflix.
