Strange Magic

All of this just works. ― Todd Howard

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This movie is strange alright, but for... different reasons.

Strange Magic is a 2015 Computer-Animated Fantasy Film created by Walt Disney Pictures (under their Touchstone label) and Lucasfilm Ltd. (well known for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchise). It was released on January 23, 2015.

Plot

When fairy princess Marianne sees her fiancé, Roland, kissing another fairy on their wedding day, she vows never to fall in love again. In the Dark Forest, the Bog King has the same view on love, despite his caring mother Griselda's protests.

Marianne's sister, Dawn, and her elf friend, Sunny, are nearly devoured by a giant lizard before Marianne rescues them. After falling through the border and into the Dark Forest, Sunny finds a primrose petal and hides it. At the Spring Ball, Roland tries to win back Marianne, who angrily drives him away. Roland consults his warriors, who jokingly tell him to procure the love potion to woo Marianne. Roland then encounters Sunny, who has an unrequited love for Dawn. He convinces Sunny to venture into the Dark Forest to get the love potion, which they would both use on their respective fairies. Sunny goes back and finds the hidden primrose petal and, with the guidance of an Imp, travels to the Bog King's lair, where the Sugar Plum Fairy was being held prisoner by the Bog King. Sunny finds the Sugar Plum Fairy, who agrees to make the love potion if Sunny promises to set her free.

Plum's escape rouses Bog King, who recaptures her while Sunny and the Imp escape. Sunny returns to the ball and tries to hit Dawn with the love potion. Bog interrupts the celebrations and captures Dawn just as she is sprayed by the love potion and the imp steals it in order to spread it throughout the forest. Bog orders them to deliver the potion to him by moon-down or he will harm Dawn. Defying her father's order, Marianne flies off after her sister while he grants Roland a small army to head off on foot to Bog's castle.

Dawn falls in love with Bog due to the potion, and Bog has her imprisoned for his own sanity. Marianne arrives and fights with Bog to return her sister. When she realizes the severity of the situation, the two of them begin to find common interests. When they consult Sugar Plum for an antidote, she explains that true love will negate the effects of the potion. A mutual attraction begins to develop between Marianne and Bog, but only Griselda sees it.

Sunny recovers the potion from the imp and gives it to Roland as they march on to the castle. Bog sees this and suspects that Marianne had set him up, breaking his heart again as he leaves her stranded in a spider web. She escapes and joins in the battle taking place at the castle. Sunny frees Sugar Plum, Dawn, and the love-stricken forest creatures that the imp had hit with the love potion.

In the escape, Bog holds the mouth of his den open long enough for everyone to escape. He survives, to Marianne's relief, and Sunny reveals his true feelings to Dawn, and they kiss. Bog and Marianne finally admit their feelings for each other and kiss.

Why It's Awfully Strange

1. The story, courtesy of George Lucas, uses every love cliché you can find in the book:
   • The "no one loves me because I'm hideous" cliché.
   • The forced love cliché combined with the love potion cliché, and the predictable "power of true love" trope.
   • The romantic chemistry built up via song cliché.
   • The misunderstanding before the climax cliché.
   • The "I want more in life" cliché.
   • The "Disney death" cliché at the near end of the movie.
2. To make the clichés even worse, there is no originality whatsoever:
   • Bog King is either the Beast from Beauty and the Beast or Shrek. The misunderstanding cliché said above can be even compared to Shrek.
   • Roland is a bland version of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast and a worse version of Hans from Frozen.
   • As AniMat pointed out in his review, the setting and environment, such as the woodland creatures being the steed of the ferries, are way too similar to Epic
3. Specking of which, the film also has a really basic and generic plot that rip-offs previous films, chef of which being Epic and Frozen.
   1. As a matter of fact, the ENTIRE film is a rip-off of Frozen, right down to the plot being about two princesses - one extrovert, one introvert - going on a journey to save the other, but are interrupted by a surprise villain fiancé who wants to be king. No coincident at all!
4. Misleading Box-Art: From the box-art, you would think that the main characters of Strange Magic would be the creatures, however all of them (with the slight exception being Griselda(the Bog King's mother) and the Imp) are actually background characters, the real main characters are the ones shown in the back of the box art.
5. VERY divisive animation in a very similar sinaryo to Magical DoReMi, while it can look absolutely beautiful with interesting textures and small but really neat details, the main problem is that it looks very bleak and muggy, with odd choice of coloring for the background and even some of the characters, and very poor lighting though out the film. Because of this, it makes the animation of Strange Magic look more like Final Fantasy cut-scenes out of a PlayStation 4 or an old Xbox 360/PlayStation 2/GameCube game, not a feature-length animated film released in theaters.
   1. This is made even worst by its released date, as despite Strange Magic looking more like something out of the early 2000s; this film came out in 2015, and previous (and later) computer-animated films that came out the same year (like Pixar’s Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur (the first two of which were created by Disney previously), Sony Pictures Animation’s Hotel Transylvania 2, Paramount Animation and Nickelodeon’s The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, 20th Century Fox and Blue Sky Studios’ The Peanuts Movie, Universal Pictures and Illumination’s Minions and DreamWorks Animation’s Home) had much better coloring and lighting.
   2. Heck, even Rango, which came out 4 years earlier then Strange Magic and has similar animation, looks way better then this.
6. Ugly character models for the main characters, more particularly the fairy characters, most of which have very squinted looking faces and sharp-bend eyes, in the Nostalgia Critic's review of the film, he even stats that they look like the recycling bin of Mars Needs Moms, and again, they look more like human models from Final Fantasy or any Square Enix game from the 2010s.
   • Ironically, Bog King looks the least creepy out of all the character designs.
   • Roland's lips look weird.
   • On a side note, the Fairy King looks uncannily similar to George Lucas himself. Was that intentional?
   • While a lot of the visuals are admittedly creative, the ending shot is just random, psychedelic, and nauseating.
7. Many plot elements that complete rip-off Shrek, some of the characters even look like something out of Shrek.
8. Unlikable main characters:
   • Marianne is just Kayley from Quest for Camelot (who in return is a rip-off of Belle from Beauty and the Beast) as a fairy; she's a young girl who desires to be a fighter and gain more out of life. Never heard that one before! And even besides that, she's little more than a very unlikable, generic, whiny, and one-dimensional main character, and she doesn't do anything new or interesting with the "princess who wants more out of life" character archetype (but then again, that trope has been done so many times in movies that it's pretty hard to do something new with it, though it still doesn't save Marianne from feeling incredibly generic).
   • Dawn is very annoying, stupid, and boy-crazy. The film itself seems to be aware of this while she's affected by the love potion, with Marianna even outright telling the Bog King that she's " a girl who falls in love with every guy she sees" at one point. She also ends up with Sunny in the end after being freed from the effects of the love potion even though she hasn't shown any romantic interest in him before and just saw him as a friend.
   • Bog King's minions are unfunny comic reliefs with stupid running gags.
   • The Sugarplum Fairy is ridiculous and unbearable, doing almost nothing other than making stupid jokes. Her obnoxious voice (Kristin Chenoweth deserves better) doesn't help.
   • Sunny is stupid, seeing that he promised to take care of the love potion yet screwed everything up at the ball. He also comes across as kind of a jerk; he feels so entitled to Dawn that he's willing to use the love potion on her because he's afraid she won't return his feelings, even though he's never actually asked her how she feels about him. And he never gets any repercussions for his actions and just gets the girl in the end.
   • Roland, similar to Hans from Frozen and even Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, is an incredibly predictable and moronic villain. You can actually see his turn to being the antagonist within the first act.
   • The Fairy King, being the typical overprotective father and king, forbade Marianne from searching for Dawn and his reason is never explained nor justified. And even after Roland cheated on his daughter on her wedding day, and he found out, he's still willing to have him marry his daughter? Come on!
   • Griselda is even worse as an annoying parent character.
9. An overabundants of music numbers that makes even The Pebble and the Penguin and Atlantis SquarePantis more tolerable (with a grand total of 14 Musical Numbers), most of which have no impact to the film's narrative what-so-ever and can easily be cut from the film.
10. In addition to that, the musical numbers are just horrible takes on popular songs. While previous films like Moulin Rouge and Happy Feet prove that jukebox-musicals can work in a movie, this one does not hit those notes:
    • The opening number, taking "Can't Help Falling in Love" by Elvis Presley, comes legitimately out of nowhere and doesn't flow properly.
    • Not one minute later, the use "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" from Promises, Promises, and it just doesn't work well with Marianne turning herself into a warrior princess.
    • "Three Little Birds" by Bob Marley and the Wailers follows within the next scene (what is the standard gap between musical numbers again?) and it doesn't do anything other than waste time.
    • After Roland makes a weak attempt at a river dance joke, "Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You)" by Kelly Clarkson and it just says everything already said in the "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" scene.
    • "Trouble", another Elvis Presley song, is just turned into a generic rock number introducing the villain.
    • There is no purpose for "Mistreated" by Deep Purple other than to say "rock song equals villain".
    • "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)" by Four Tops is just used to show how annoying Dawn is. This would be funny if it didn't get so repetitive.
    • The only good musical number is "Strange Magic" by Electric Light Orchestra, but even there it fails because of the clunky romantic chemistry built up.
    • There is even one bizarre moment where Roland's army is marching into the Dark Forest to a chant version of "Bad Romance" by Lady Gaga. That wasn't even included in the soundtrack album, but why was it in the movie to begin with?
11. INCREDIBLE cheesy and laughable character dialoged.
12. The film takes already existing quantity-over-quality problems in The Magic Voyage, Felix the Cat: The Movie, and Walking with Dinosaurs and makes them even worse. Not only do the characters never shut up, but they also never stop singing! Given how as stated in the #9 Segment, there's a total of 14 musical numbers in the entirety of the film (and just for comparison's sake, the average Disney musical has 6), they come up so frequently that it never gives the audience a moment to breathe; it can even make them appreciate the songs even less, on top of the songs already being pop-rock versions of hand-picked popular songs.
13. Average yet irritating voice acting, especially from characters like Sunny (Elijah Kelley), Sugar Plum Fairy (Kristin Chenoweth), and Griselda (Maya Rudolph). There are some good voice talents for characters like Bog King (Alan Cumming) and Marianne (Evan Rachel Wood), but there's too much of the rest.
14. Misleading title: Despite the title Strange Magic, there isn't anything strange about the magic in the movie. As love potions, the primary form of magic in the film has already been done before many many times. There is nothing strange or unique about the magic in the movie whatsoever!
15. Though out the course of the film, there are many plot-points that never get explain, leading to many rushed scenes and also creates multiple plot-holes.
    1. When, were and why did Roland cheat on Marianne, and why does he do so a few months before his and Marianne's wedding?
    2. When did Sunny feel in love with Dawn, and also, instead of making a Love Potion, thus starting most of the plot to happen in the first place, why doesn't he just say so to her in the first place?
    3. Perhaps the biggest rush plot-point that's never explained is Marianne's change in tone and personality, during the first couple minutes of the film, Marianne was all lovey-dovey, clumsy and very simple-minded with a kind-heart, but right after finding out Roland was cheating on her and getting back to her game, Marianne becomes serious and always ready for action while at the same time, keeping her kind-hearted nature. While its understanding for Marinne to gain a change in tone (mostly due to Marianne's broken heart after finding out that Roland was cheating on her), this scene in particular still has no in-reason as to when Marianne became that serious and even explains as to how much time has even past, all of the characters even wear the same cloths.
       1. In Marianne's bio on the Disney Wiki, it has been explain that months has past, tho you wouldn't know that unless you looked it up.
    4. Bog King and Marianne's romantic chemistry is not developed properly as they only begin to fall in love near the end, with only 20 minutes left in the running time. Yes, they were shown to be perfect for each other as they both shared a distaste for sugary, romantic displays and later started to bond over their respective heartbreaks, but the fact that they end up together in only a couple of hours is still just shows how rushed the story was. This is even worse than when George Lucas handled romantic chemistry in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Even Pixar did romantic chemistry better when it came to EVE and WALL-E's relationship in WALL-E (which is far superior, and came out 7 years before this film), which managed to develop their chemistry with slick precision since it used the running time with true effort and didn't rush the pacing of the movie, thus showing a huge disparge between the 2 films.
16. Roland is WAY too obvious that he's gonna be the main villain.
17. Pop-Culture references, such as some of the characters singing songs such as "Stronger"(as explained in the #10 Segment) and "Tonight's Gonna Be A Good Night".
18. When the film attempts comedy, more often than not, it falls flat either coming off as cringeworthy or just plain unfunny:
    • As mentioned above, Dawn singing "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)" would be funny if the gag wasn't so repetitive.
    • The post-credits scene where Roland kissing a fly when he's affected by the love potion is very tasteless, disgusting, creepy, and unfunny. Adding salt to the wound is why was this even in the trailer in the first place?
19. A plethora of cringe-inducing scenes, such as the scene were the other female bugs try to seduce Bog King, one of which is a female cockroach with lipstick, that comes closer to the camera in a VERY creepy fashion.
20. Strange Magic is also very predictable, as its very easy to tell whats gonna happen due to the film's unoriginal structure, even its scenes are predictable, most noticeable during the battle with Marianne and the Bog King, you can easily tell that they'll fall in love with each other.
21. The Imp is a basic and bland rip-off of Scrat from Ice Age and Heather from Over the Hedge, and serves as nothing more then bland comic-referee moments with Sunny.

Redeeming Qualities

1. Despite WISA#5 and the uncanny designs, the animation is can be beautiful and splendid to look at, with all the detailed textures and special effects, all done by Lucasfilm's visual effects studio Industrial Light and Magic, which preciously did the animation of Rango.
   • There's also plenty of creative editing choices in the musical numbers. So there's that.
2. The Imp (despite bad quality#21 and being a carbon copy of Scrat from the Ice Age franchise) can be likable at times, is tolerable compared to the other characters, is a bit more likable then the rest of the unlikable characters, and the Bog King is a decent antagonist later turned hero and gets some interesting character development.
3. Some funny moments, such as Dawn singing "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)" and annoying Bog King and his minions before it got repetitive.
   • Despite the statement in the #17 segment, there are a few funny lines, such as the scene were after the Imp gets eaten by a lizard, Sunny demands the Imp to hand back the potion, and after the Imp starts thinking, Sunny sarcastically says "Oh sure, go ahead and think, I just wait for you at the OTHER end of the lizard.", causing the Imp to give the potion back.
4. The chemistry between Marianne and the Bog King, while being a but rushed, is well though-out, and its also pretty heart-warming.
5. It was a sweet idea for George Lucas to make a film for his daughters, despite the idea being poorly executed.
   • On that topic, George Lucas described the concept as "Star Wars for girls", which does hinder the idea a little bit, despite sounding a bit sexist.
6. Brenda Chapman, Evan Rachel Wood, and Alan Cumming do surprisingly pretty great jobs voicing Imp, Marianne and the Bog King respectively, putting a lot of effort into the bad media they were told to voice.

Reception

Box office

In its opening weekend, Strange Magic opened at #7 and grossed $5.5 million. It had the lowest ticket sales of any animated film released in over 3,000 theatres. The previous animated films with lowest opening weekend gross were The Wild Thornberrys Movie (2002) and Quest for Camelot (1998). The film closed on April 16, 2015 and had earned $12,429,583 in the domestic box office, with $1,173,870 overseas for a worldwide total of $13,603,453.

Critical response

Strange Magic revive largely negative reviews by Critics and Fans alike. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 18%, based on 62 reviews, with an average rating of 3.8/10, as of October 2021. The website's critical consensus states, "Like most modern animated movies, Strange Magic is lovely to look at; unfortunately, there isn't much going on beneath the surface." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 25 out of 100, based on 20 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.

Alonso Duralde of The Wrap gave a negative review, writing "That terrible character design, combined with a painful lack of laughs and a crushing plethora of ghastly songs, makes Strange Magic perhaps the worst animated feature ever to come out of Disney." Conversely, Drew Taylor of Indiewire gave the film a B−, stating in his review "Strange Magic does manage to enchant you (mostly) with its oddball charm." Justin Chang of Variety gave the film a negative review, saying "This noisy, unappealing children's fantasy fails to distinguish itself among January's many, many reasons to steer clear of the multiplex." Alan Scherstuhl of The Village Voice described Strange Magic as "the best Lucas film in 25 years: funny, idiosyncratic, hippy-dippy, packed with creatures and visions worth beholding." Michael Rechtshaffen of The Hollywood Reporter called the film "A shrill, garish hodgepodge of familiar elements from other animated vehicles (most evidently 2013's Epic), there's virtually nothing about this forced, fractured fairy tale that feels remotely fresh or involving." Michael Ordoña of the San Francisco Chronicle gave the film one out of four stars, saying "The plot movement feels very much like an unpleasant formality, shoved forward by tiresome devices." Claudia Puig of USA Today gave the film two out of four stars, saying "Strange Magic is strange all right, but hardly magical." Jesse Hassenger of The A.V. Club gave the film a B, saying "The movie maintains its own level of oddball invention that at least feels pleasantly removed from the grind of big-studio cartoon manufacturing." Rafer Guzman of Newsday gave the film one out of four stars, saying "A noxious cauldron of ingredients that shouldn't have been mixed: fairies, Shakespeare and classic rock."

Lou Lumenick of the New York Post gave the film one out of four stars, saying "If Lucasfilm had bought Disney instead of the other way around, the smash hit Frozen might have turned out like Strange Magic, a jaw-droppingly terrible animated musical that mismatches George Lucas' inane story about a pair of fairy princesses to an oddball selection of the Star Wars creator's favorite pop tunes." Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times gave the film a negative review, saying "Strange Magic, the new animated musical fairy tale from the mind and the mixtape of George Lucas, is indeed strange. What's missing is the magic." Ben Kenigsberg of The New York Times gave the film a negative review, saying "Said to be inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream, the film plays more like Avatar scored to a karaoke competition." Bilge Ebiri of New York magazine gave the film a negative review, saying "The problem with Strange Magic isn't so much its derivative story as it is the odd, half-complete way it unfolds. You can sense the weird mixture of tones, influences, ideas—as if the whole thing were still in its planning stages." Glenn Kenny of RogerEbert.com gave the film one and a half stars out of four, saying "Strange Magic is essentially a jukebox musical so song-laden as to practically be an operetta, and the songs are so eclectic that they never quite fit into the movie's flying-insect world, which is divided into dark and light forests." Keith Phipps of The Dissolve gave the film one and a half stars out of five, saying "Strange Magic certainly isn't an ordinary sort of mess, and the personal nature of the project is still evident in the finished film."

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