BEFORE: Wrapping up another animation block tonight - I could keep going, but the decisions have already been made about which films will fill the last movie slots of Year 6 and which have to be postponed until Year 7 - which was tough, because the list is always changing, so I never know if I'm leaving myself with a workable chain for 2015 or not. Linking from "Frozen", Ciaran Hinds was also in "In Bruges" with Colin Farrell.
THE PLOT: A teenager finds herself transported to a deep forest setting where a battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil is taking place. She bands together with a rag-tag group of characters in order to save their world.
AFTER: This film makes "Frozen" look like a marvel of simplicity - where "Frozen" had four main characters and two sidekicks, this one has at least 5 main characters, 1 villain, and four talking animal sidekicks. Over-complicated by half, it turns out the forest has all these arcane rules for succession to the queen, and that involves picking the right leaf pod, keeping it moist, and allowing it to bloom under a full moon so that it can pick the next queen, or something like that, and if these rules aren't followed to the letter, the whole forest will DIE. Or turn to rot, which is apparently even worse.
Plus there are Boggans, which are grey villain creatures that look like sharks made out of bark (bark sharks?) and their leader uses evil rot magic, and there are hummingbird races and tiny leafman archers and libraries inside of trees. Who knew all this stuff was going on in a forest, but at such a tiny scale you can't even see it?
Admittedly the scale thing is a little bit weird. If you think about things like mice and rats, you can identify them by shape no matter how big they are - you can tell from looking at a tiny mouse that it's a mouse. But somehow when people are tiny mouse-sized, a regular-sized person can't tell they're tiny people, which doesn't really follow. Plus there's some kind of time-shift, so time passes differently for a tiny person, their actions are all sped up like hummingbirds, and big humans appear to move and talk very slowly.
But if that's the case, then weeks of time would pass for the little people in just one human day, and if our heroine spent two human days (let's assume) in the tiny world, that should feel like months to her, no? Then their whole scale of time would be off, one human night would be like a period of great darkness to them, like winter in the Arctic Circle, and that's not what goes on, so something's not adding up. Or am I overthinking it?
Also starring the voices of Amanda Seyfried (last seen in "Mean Girls"), Josh Hutcherson (last seen in "Zathura: A Space Adventure"), Christoph Waltz (last seen in "Django Unchained"), Beyoncé Knowles, Aziz Ansari (last heard in "Ice Age: Continental Drift"), Chris O'Dowd (last seen in "This Is 40"), Steven Tyler, Jason Sudeikis (last seen in "We're the Millers"), Pitbull, with cameos from Thomas F. Wilson, Judah Friedlander (last seen in "Along Came Polly"), Blake Anderson, Troy Evans.
RATING: 4 out of 10 acorns
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