Rachel Zegler’s Netflix Musical Misses Magic

There’s a scene midway through “Spellbound,” the new Netflix animated movie musical starring Rachel Zegler, where we briefly wander through a vast forest captured in a weird one-shot montage. Looking down on a group of characters venturing into the great unknown, we glimpse a shot of butterflies all taking off into the sky.

At this moment, thoughts immediately flew to this year’s beautiful “The Wild Robot”, where a similar scene unfolds. But even though they are broadly similar, the execution of each couldn’t be more different. Where the wonderful “The Wild Robot” patiently allows us to sit with its stunning and vivid visuals, allowing us to fully awe the moment, “Spellbound” just lets this slip away. It’s without any wonder or whimsy that the animation looks rather flat instead of bursting with breathtaking depth. Instead, it’s capped by a derivative dad joke.

This brief moment is just one of the many ways in which “Spellbound” is unable to escape the shadow cast by several other superior works, though it best reveals the film’s ultimate lack of imagination it never overcomes.

Leading through all of this is Zegler’s determined Princess Ellian, a young elf-eared girl who is unexpectedly tasked with overseeing the kingdom of Lumbria when her parents, the otherwise friendly King (Javier Bardem) and Queen (Nicole Kidman), are not quite himself. Specifically, they have become quite monstrous. This is literal as they have been transformed into huge creatures by a mysterious spell after wandering into the dark forest. Ellian has tried to keep all of this a secret as he struggles to find a way to return them to their normal selves, even as the people of Lumbria begin to question what has happened to them.

Hearing back from a pair of bubbly oracles about a potential solution, she ventures into the lands beyond the castle with her monster parents, pursued by the kingdom’s soldiers intent on locking them away forever. Oh, and while the trailers don’t reveal this, it’s a musical. This deficit, which is an increasingly common tactic that has plagued Hollywood, is a shame, as the tunes are the best part of a middling movie and could even be fun for younger, less discerning viewers to sing along to when it hits them high notes.

With that in mind, while Zegler has more than proven her singing chops in films like “West Side Story” and “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” “Spellbound” rarely gives her real moments to shine. While they couldn’t be more different in their presentations, it ends up being similar to her upcoming film “Y2K,” both in how directionless and twisted they manage to be, as well as how each ultimately wastes Zegler’s talents. For too many large stretches of “Spellbound” it feels like we’re getting stuck in an expository setup for the energetic and fun adventure film it wants to be. It reaches a point that feels like it’s in danger of never getting there, leaving the pieces that should be the focus rushed and shallow. The central emotional relationship with her parents feels lifted from something like the spectacular “Spirited Away,” though without any of the more deserved lingering emotions that the film brought to life.

This is not for lack of trying. You can feel that the film is increasingly striving for depths that it cannot quite fathom. Director and co-writer Vicky Jenson, who previously co-directed the original “Shrek” and 2015’s “Shark Tale,” is no stranger to exploring more playful but thoughtful themes of family relationships, even if they come too close to the end of ” Spellbound” for it to have any effect. The problem is that Ellian’s relationship with her parents is mostly limited to the occasional ghostly flashback before the film goes on to spell out exactly what you should be feeling. It goes from providing exposition on the mechanics of the plot to doing the same for the thematic and emotional components, reducing this to being just as mechanical as a result.

There’s a heartfelt core to this, but it’s never drawn well enough to come out. All of the supposed central conflicts rely on contrivances that mostly just take away from the internal emotional struggles that “Spellbound” gives short shrift. By the time the movie demands we know what Ellian and her parents are like as characters, you realize how little you know about them beyond the pretty much broad archetypes the movie half-heartedly gave them. Then when we get something like a forced joke about rideshare app ratings, it only distracts from what were already underdeveloped characters that are now made even more so. When we then become absorbed in their search for some kind of potent meaning, it’s hard to feel invested in the journey.

All of this could be overlooked if the animation was striking and memorable in some way. Unfortunately, like Skydance’s previous feature “Luck”, the various designs from the landscapes to the characters never appear off screen. It constantly looks like every other generic computer-animated film from the last decade and does nothing to set itself apart. Expressions don’t hit home when characters are flatly emotive and the world they’re in just seems like a stagnant series of backgrounds rather than something truly alive. For all the ground the film purportedly covers, it all remains destined to fade from the mind completely.

The use of computer animation is not the problem, as “The Wild Robot” once again shows that you can create something visually stunning with this technique. What’s the problem is that all of this is in service of something that rarely flies or feels remotely magical. While there are some funny enough bits scattered throughout the film, they don’t come together into what could be a compelling whole. The image that sticks in the mind is again the butterflies: not because “Spellbound” makes them stand out, but because you wish you could fly away with them to a better movie.