BEFORE: I fell behind for a little bit there, but with these shorter animated movies, I can catch up again, get back to a point where I'm starting the film around 11 pm the night before, rather than on the day of posting. It's nice when I feel like I have a little bit of a cushion. I've had a really long weekend away from the theater, but it's time to get back there tomorrow because it's both thesis time and film festival season, so there should be a lot of shifts I can work. I can really only do that when I'm in a good head-space, and I know that I have a clear path to the next holiday, Mother's Day. I've got that, so I can start working on the head-space thing.
Dee Bradley Baker carries over from "The Monkey King".
THE PLOT: Ellian is a tenacious princess who must go on a daring quest to save her family and kingdom after a mysterious spell transforms her parents, the King and Queen of Lumbria, into monsters.
AFTER: I really wasn't looking forward to this one - like, great, another film about fairy-tale princesses, totally relatable to all the non-princesses out there in the audience. Life is perfect, they have everything they need or want and they just have to worry about finding their fairy-tale prince and their fairy-tale ending. Well, this is totally not that - OK, it's partially not that.
Yes, the princess is a very entitled teen - her life may not be perfect, but she EXPECTS it to be. You can say that about a lot of teen girls out there in the world - if they're stressed out, it's because their life isn't perfect, but they EXPECT it to be. Maybe this is because of all the movies and books made over the year that do depict "perfect" fairy-tale princesses. Take Snow White for example, bad things may happen to her, but SHE remains perfect, white as snow and all that, and she still has a smile on her face and joy in her heart. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, same thing, bad things happen TO them, but they are (close to) perfect figures, nothing is their fault, they're just good people in bad circumstances.
Movies like "Shrek" flipped the script, though, and the fact that Disney keeps making films like "Snow White" means that somebody somewhere didn't get the memo. Modern fairy-tales need to look at princesses through a more modern lens, and that means they have personal problems, family problems, maybe even job problems. Ruling over a city or a region or whatever isn't necessarily the cherry job it used to be. The army may have a situation to deal with, the people may have different ideas about their form of government, the city-state could run into money problems, or what have you. The whole monarchy system could come crashing down at any moment if the populace could only organize and get their act together.
And so into this new world of modern-day more-fractured fairy tales comes "Spellbound", where a princess is introduced and she's got a lot of problems, some of which may not be solvable. Already it's more relatable to the teens who want to exemplify the princess lifestyle, but life keeps getting in the way. We have people now who put an image of themselves out into the world via Instagram and TikTok, but what's really going on at home? Could be a completely different story. So we have Princess Ellian, who needs to keep up appearances to her people even though her parents, the King and Queen, were cursed a year ago and turned into monsters. Nobody talks about the exact details, in fact they may not even know, they just know that these two giant creatures (carefully color-coded and with some masculine/feminine features so we'll all know which is which) like to run rampant through the kingdom and break everything in the castle, and sometimes try to eat the staff.
Of course, we could just cut to the chase and say that "honesty is the best policy", so maybe if Ellian and her advisers just told everyone what was going on, maybe everyone could work together to find a solution - but then, we wouldn't have a movie, would we? So they keep covering for the King and Queen's absence - "Oh, they're in a state meeting." "Oh, they're entertaining foreign dignitaries." "Oh, they had a doctor's appointment, you just missed them." But after a year of using cardboard cut-outs to wave to the people, maybe it's time to come clean.
Ellian turns 15, and her advisers want her to ascend to the throne, but really this means they want to control her, and thus control the country. Ellian won't give up on her parents, though, and summons the Oracle of the Sun and Moon (a very nice gay couple from the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness) to come and see if there's any way to turn the rulers back into humans. After some confusion, and attempts by the monsters to eat the oracles, it's determined that there's no solution BUT if the monsters could be brought to the Dark Forest, maybe there could be a way. But that means going on a journey across the forest to the Lake of Light, and if they could be bathed in the lake, their true nature could be revealed...
A simple quest, sure, but at this point the path to that quest just gets more and more complicated - Adviser Bolinar gets body-swapped with Ellian's pet, Flink, for example. Ellian and her parents have to travel through a cavern where sound becomes bubbles of light or laser beams. There's a whole ocean of quicksand, which they could avoid but going around the long way would take, well, longer. By all means, let's keep throwing problems in the path of our heroes, because that's the hero's journey, right? The more difficult the trip, the better we're all going to feel when they succeed. But also, it feels like set up the ending point and then delay, delay, delay. There's a song when Bolivar (in Flink's body) finds other creatures like him and they offer him gross (but delicious) food to eat, and he loves it. It's a fine song, but it doesn't get everyone any closer to the Lake of Light, does it?
Eventually (the film runs 109 minutes, but with all the delays, it feels much longer) they make it across all of the obstacles to the Lake of Light, and along the way, the personalities of the King and Queen started to manifest themselves again, by working together and positive affirmations, they regained the power of speech. But this is when we learn that the whole monster thing was one giant metaphor, the couple was fighting so much that the Darkness took over them and turned them into monstrous creatures - this is relatable to a lot of teens out there, probably. Mommy and Daddy can't live together any more, where does that leave their daughter? Well, they both still love Ellian very much, so they're going to work out who gets custody of the palace while they separate and co-parent, because this is the only way to prevent the Darkness from carrying over to their daughter and turning her into a "monster" too.
Maybe it's a bit on the nose, like you won't always see a black vortex appear when the rage takes over a couple that is fighting, and you won't see the disagreements and arguments literally turn people into mindless monsters, but at least it's an analogy that works, and also gives us insight into modern complicated parental relationships, while maintaining the quest/hero's journey format. Very clever, indeed, and maybe something that will help children of separating parents cope with their situations.
Weird trivia notes tonight, I realized that the King and Queen are voiced by Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman, who also played Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, another married couple with problems, in "Being the Ricardos". Also, Kidman played a Queen mermaid in "Aquaman" and Bardem played King Triton in "The Little Mermaid" - that's an odd coincidence, or is it?
Directed by Vicky Jenson
Also starring the voices of Rachel Zegler (last seen in "The Hunger Games; The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Stoker"), Javier Bardem (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), John Lithgow (last seen in "Marvin Hamlisch: What He Did for Love"), Jenifer Lewis (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Olga Merediz (last seen in 'Somebody I Used to Know"), Tituss Burgess (last seen in "Then Came You"), Nathan Lane (last seen in "Beau Is Afraid"), John Ratzenberger (last heard in "Inside Out 2"), Miguel Bernardeau, Giovanna Bush, Dennis Stowe, Susan Fitzer (last heard in "Penguins of Madagascar"), Rich Moore (last heard in "Vivo"), Vicky Jenson
RATING: 6 out of 10 gryphon cats
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