To commemorate its 100th anniversary last year, Disney decided to showcase just how far its animated output had fallen with the release of Wish, a desperate, and commercially disastrous, remix of its princess movies. Developed in the shadow of the subgenre-restarting phenomenon that was Frozen, it was a soulless regurgitation that showed how a certain magic had become so hard to conjure in a kingdom that used to be so full of it.
There’s the overwhelming feeling of deja vu with the release of Spellbound – another princess musical about magic led by the voice of an actor from Spielberg’s West Side Story with songs written by a once-esteemed award winner out on the exact same day – and while expectations are lower with a Netflix animation, the takeaway remains the same. They just don’t make ’em like they used to.
In the case of Spellbound, that’s distractingly clear from the outset. The film, announced back in 2017 with Paramount before changing titles twice, moving from multiple release dates and shifting to Apple and then Netflix, looks every bit the sold-down-the-pub knock-off, plagued with animation far cheaper than we’re used to outside of low-rent kids TV. It’s not quite Cocomelon but it exists in an entirely other universe far, far away from the many Disney films it’s trying to file itself next to.
You’d be easily fooled by the names involved though. Voices include Rachel Zegler, Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem and John Lithgow; it’s produced by the Toy Story director and ex-Pixar chief, John Lasseter; directed by Shrek’s Vicky Jenson and music is from the Oscar-winner Alan Menken, whose credits include The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. But there’s nothing here to warrant such an array of A-listers, the film’s aforementioned journey perhaps explaining why it’s ended up such a head-scratcher.
The gimmick here is that Princess Ellian is the only human left in the royal family after her parents were both turned into monsters the year before (the film’s first mistake is inserting us into the story after they’ve already been transformed). She must keep it a secret from the kingdom, forced into taking on a more responsible role at a very young age and exhausted by the chaos created by her parents turned monsters. Unlike in more traditional transformation stories, the king and queen are completely unaware of who they once were, voices replaced with grunts and a desire to care for their daughter now overtaken by a need for food.
Ellian must go on a quest to find a cure, one that includes a ton of forgettable songs (Menken’s involvement is sadly not the get it should have been), some implied LGBTQ+ representation (we did it!) and a grab-bag of films it cribs from. There’s a bit of Brave, a dash of Shrek and a surprising amount of Inside Out as the film suggests that fairytale darkness, the kind that turns people into monsters, is the result of negative feelings. In the story, these can be traced back to problems within the royal marriage and there is a noble, if scattered, attempt to turn it into a lesson for children about how to handle domestic discord.
But it’s all too scrappy and derivative to make a mark. The ongoing attempt to move away from traditional and gendered story-telling has rightfully allowed female characters to gain more control over their trajectories, spending less time pining for princes and more time focusing on themselves. But it’s also resulted in a dearth of antagonists and Spellbound is missing the conflict and stakes that come with a true villain (the greatest thing about Wish was Chris Pine’s malevolent magician). There’s just nothing here that sticks, not the calculated attempt to create a cute and merchandisable sidekick, not the limp, un-hummable music numbers and not the bright yet uninventive video game universe the characters exist in. It never really feels like we’re on a journey anywhere we haven’t been before, with Spellbound far too bewitched with the past to create any of its own magic.
