Enchanted Review – Netflix’s Misfire Disney Princess Cut | Animation in film

To celebrate its 100th anniversary last year, Disney decided to show how far its animated output had fallen with the release of Wish, a desperate, and commercially disastrousremix of its princess movie. Developed in the shadow of the subgenre reboot phenomenon that was Frozen, it was a soulless regurgitation that showed how a certain magic had become so hard to conjure in a kingdom that used to be so full of it.

There is the overwhelming sense of deja vu with the release of Spellbound – another princess musical about magic led by the voice of an actor from Spielberg’s West Side Story with songs written by a once-esteemed award winner out on the exact same day – and while expectations are lower with a Netflix animation, the takeaway remains the same. They just don’t make them like they used to.

In the case of Spellbound, it’s distractingly clear from the start. The film, which was announced back in 2017 with Paramount before changing titles twice, moving from multiple release dates and switching to Apple and then Netflix, at least looks like the sold-down-the-pub knock-off plagued by animation far cheaper than we. is used to outside low-rent children’s TV. It’s not quite Cocomelon, but it exists in a completely different universe far, far away from the many Disney films it tries to file alongside.

However, you would be easily fooled by the names involved. Voices include Rachel Zegler, Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem and John Lithgow; it is produced by Toy Story director and former Pixar executive John Lasseter; directed by Shrek’s Vicky Jenson and scored by Oscar winner Alan Menken, whose credits include The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. But there’s nothing here to warrant such a string of A-listers, the film’s aforementioned journey perhaps explaining why it ended up being such a head-scratcher.

The gimmick here is that Princess Ellian is the only human left in the royal family after her parents were both turned into monsters the year before (the film’s first mistake is inserting us into the story after they have already been transformed). She must keep it a secret from the kingdom, forced to take on a more responsible role at a very young age, and exhausted by the chaos created by her parents-turned-monsters. Unlike in more traditional transformation stories, the king and queen are completely unaware of who they once were, voices replaced with grunts and a desire to care for their daughter now overtaken by a need for food.

Ellian embarks on a quest to find a cure, one that includes a ton of forgettable songs (Menken’s involvement isn’t what it should have been, sadly), implied LGBTQ+ representation (we did!) and a package of movies it creeps away. There’s a bit of Brave, a touch of Shrek, and a surprising amount of Inside Out, as the film suggests that fairytale darkness, the kind that turns people into monsters, is the result of negative emotions. In history, these can be traced back to problems within the royal marriage, and there is a noble, if scattered, attempt to make it a lesson for children on how to deal with domestic discord.

But it’s far too scrappy and derivative to mark. The ongoing attempt to move away from traditional and gendered storytelling has rightfully given female characters more control over their trajectories, spending less time searching for princes and more time focusing on themselves. But it’s also resulted in a lack of antagonists, and Spellbound lacks the conflict and stakes that come with a real villain (the biggest thing about Wish was Chris Pine’s malevolent magician). There’s just nothing here that sticks, not the calculated attempt to create a cute and merchandisable sidekick, not the limp, skinless musical numbers, and not the bright yet uninventive video game universe the characters exist in. It never quite feels like we’re on a journey anywhere we haven’t been before, with Spellbound far too bewitched by the past to create any of its own magic.