Strange Magic

Strange Magic is endearing and well-animated; and that's enough to forgive the film for being highly derivative, constantly adhering to tropes and occasionally falling flat on its jokes. Unfortunately it's not enough to forgive the soundtrack. The voice acting is good, as is the music and song performances, but the adapted pop songs don't fit as flawlessly into the narrative as they should. The result is somewhat distracting, and it feels like watching an animated episode of Glee.

A cute film that doesn't do nearly enough with what it has, I'd give a lot to see a copy of this from an alternate dimension where Joss Whedon directed it.

Strange Magic isn't going to set the world on fire, and it does at times feel like a mediocre and sloppy knockoff of Frozen and Beauty and the Beast, but I didn't dislike watching it. The soundtrack is good, the animation is great, and the voice acting works. Sure, the plot is a mess, characters change direction on a whim, and the whole "love" theme is hit on the head so hard that it probably got a concussion, but I didn't hate Strange Magic, and that's as nice as I can be about it.

Remarkably bad.

Musically somewhat of a test of patience. Horrible character design does not help either, but it’s not without some redeeming qualities if overall forgettable rather than outright bad.

Oh George, no.

Tragically mediocre writing given how beautiful the production is. The art, character design, everything except the writing is there. But there's just no saving how trite the script is. :( Still, maybe entertaining for a child who has no idea how worn out every single joke, catchphrase and one-liner is. Even the character concepts were delightful.

It feels fragmented and oddly paced, goes into 'welp, gotta wrap it up' mode with zero elegance (the resolution to the subplot with the tiny elf dude and the princess' sister being the most blatant example I've ever seen), and the music aspect of the film is completely undercooked. Yet I found it all quite charming. I don't know the first thing about animation, but I thought the costumes were very neat, and the monsters were appalling li'l cutiepies. Couple of laughs, plenty of smiles.

I was expecting a gigantic bomb based on how critics reacted to this, but it's really not that bad. It's cliche as all hell, but it's harmless fun and the soundtrack is pretty good (though I think how the songs were used in the story was pretty clunky writing).

Much better than I expected... I didn't think it was an awful love story/musical... not much plot, but it was a sweet, simple story turning some fairy tale tropes on their heads.

I honestly have to admit that this film managed to surprise me at few turns. Also, as a fan of old pop, I found the soundtrack delightful. With a more polished ending and a little bit more beef on the beginning, this could have been a 10/10.

The good: Alan Cumming at least gets a COUPLE laughs out of the mediocre script, and hearing him sing Deep Purple's "Mistreated" was an unexpected treat amidst the sea of bad pop arrangements of classic songs. The bad: Literally everything else. The story is every bad jukebox musical cliche thrown together, and even the beautiful voices of the likes of Evan Rachel Wood and Kristin Chenoweth can't save this disaster. My attention started seriously wandering about halfway through.

Could have been alright with all the weird and ugly creatures, but for some reason they had to include about a 1000 songs from the golden oldies songbook to murder. When they got to the final number which was "Wild Thing" I was really hoping for Atsushi Onita to turn up and slaughter them all for the musical rapes in a no-rope exploding barbed wire timebomb cage match.

Well, at least the fairy girl was kinda cute.

Very schmaltzy, and the songs they use are a bit silly, but the animation is pretty. It's decently fun!

And all those complaints come before we dredge up the disturbing implications of the love potions or the twisted spiritual undercurrents or the stray thoughts I now have about what an elf-lizard baby would look like. (pluggedin.com)