Can we make a musical fairy tale about divorce? That seems to be the creative impetus behind Netflix's "Spellbound," the second film under the Skydance Animation banner after 2022's egregious "Luck." This one is a little better, but it's another film that's too content to riff off other popular fables when it's not pounding its metaphor like a kid with a broken toy. Some of the voice work elevates what could have been a total disaster, and the legendary Alan Menken drops a couple of entertaining compositions. But it's a largely forgettable venture that families will watch during Thanksgiving break before the Netflix algorithm buries it forever.
An engaging Rachel Zegler voices Ellian, the Princess of a fictional kingdom known as Lumbria. Her parents—Queen Ellsmere (Nicole Kidman) and King Solon (Javier Bardem, "Being the Ricardos" reunion!)—have become literal monsters as the film opens, turned into non-dangerous but troublemaking creatures by a magical spell. Under the watchful eye of Minister Bolinar (John Lithgow) and Minister Nazara Prone (Jenifer Lewis), Ellian contacts a pair of Oracles (Tituss Burgess & Nathan Lane) to figure out how to fix mom and dad, leading her on a journey across the Lumbrian landscape with her monstrous parents.
The idea that mom and dad turn into unrecognizable monsters during a divorce is subtext at first, but it becomes underlined, highlighted, and put in bold font as the film goes along, and Ellian starts to wonder if their behavior is all her fault. Every time they start fighting, a poorly rendered, tornado-looking "darkness" threatens to overtake Ellian, driving the point home even more for young viewers that divorce is not their fault and maybe reminding parents watching to be a little nicer during such a stressful time.
Of course, these are valuable themes for a film to convey (watch the masterful "Where the Wild Things Are" for a much better version of it), but it's almost all there is to "Spellbound" narratively. None of the characters register beyond their thematic purpose, and there's next to no world-building here. The palace grounds feel like AI-generated takes on the worlds of "Frozen" or even "Wish" with no personality of their own. Only a little creature eventually voiced by Lithgow (when Bolinar ends up in his body) has any sort of innovation in its character design. It speaks to a widespread problem in modern CGI animation that feels so programmed that it's lost all of its heart.
It got me thinking about alternate versions of "Spellbound" that trusted their young viewers more. There's the Studio Ghibli version that leans into the natural world in a way that makes it feel like Ellian and her monster parents are on an actual journey (and that's also much more delightfully strange than this movie). There's the Pixar version that recognizes the complexity of emotions around divorce in a way that's not so simplistic as this movie. And there's even the Dreamworks version that's probably at least funnier. I know it breaks a critical rule to think about the movies you don't have instead of just reviewing the one you do. But that's what happens when a movie fails to cast a spell as much as this one does.
On Netlix now.
